


What Waits Nowhere

by cyanspica



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Canon Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Journalist Gabriel (Supernatural), M/M, Only Steampunk, Rebel Sam Winchester, Slow Burn, Victorian, Victorian Attitudes, sam centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2019-11-15 10:27:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18071666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanspica/pseuds/cyanspica
Summary: As a freedom fighter against the empire that killed his family, Sam's spent the last eight years dodging constables, blackmailing minor government officials, and keeping out of the limelight. It was already a full plate before a journalist with an uncanny ability to single him out from a crowd was added into the mix—and that was before said reporter made sure everyone in the empire knew Sam's name.





	1. The Dirigible

**Author's Note:**

> listen I’m not shitting you this is a slow burn slow burn like imagine me sitting at a damp campsite in the middle of the night with a flint and steel except the flint is actually limestone and the steel is a sponge that’s how long it’s gonna take to light this fucking fire

 

Sam was above the choking smog of the city—ten _thousand_ feet high—held aloft on a puttering, million-dollar dirigible that could be rendered completely helpless by the removal of only a single gear.

And said gear was currently in Sam’s pocket.

It was all Sam could do to keep a straight face, maneuvering easily through the dance floor of dukes and duchesses, minor government officials, and those lucky enough to just be filthy rich—every one of them who’d love to see Sam swinging from the gallows, white-skinned with lips gone blue.

_You're_ _an adrenaline junkie,_ Lucifer had once told him, _just like me._

If Sam had known then just how right he’d turn out to be, he probably would’ve just gone back to being a scholar—something safe, something predictable, and ultimately something that nowadays would probably bore him half to death.

But there’d be time to unpack all of that later, because right now, Sam just wanted a drink to settle his nerves. Something to keep him from unravelling, losing his shit while anyone might be watching. He had to keep it together, at least until he was out of the lion’s den.

Sam slipped through a pair of top-of-the-town socialites and a duo of aristocrats, and then he was at the bar. Good, good. Just one drink, enough to help calm his nerves, and he’d blend in.

“What would you like, sir?” the bartender politely asked, and Sam had to consciously stop himself from frowning at the unfamiliarity of the _sir_. Sam Winchester might not be used to anything but slurs and insults, but _he_ was Doctor Wesson, rich and well-bred as anyone else here. Doctor Wesson only would’ve balked if he _hadn’t_ been called sir.

“Something strong,” Sam ordered, expertly smothering the inherent _G’ehenna_ accent of his voice. “I don’t suppose you would have anything from the colonies?”

Sam was craving something familiar, the honey-sweet meads and bitter beers of home, but the bartender came back with a glass of something sea green and sour-smelling instead. Vaguely, he recognized it as the absinthe of the Northern borderlands, well-removed from his homeland.

Naturally, of course.

Besides, Doctor Wesson would have an ingrained hatred of anything from _there,_ anyways.

Sam swallowed his bitterness with a mouthful of the sea-green drink and tried to flinch at the kick.

“Huh,” he muttered to himself, giving the glass a look. So the Northerners liked their strong drinks _strong,_ did they? He took another sip—a smaller one, this time. If the alcohol made him airsick and Sam puked all over his borrowed fancy leather shoes, Lucifer would have his _ass._

Drink in hand, Sam looked over his shoulder to check the dancefloor. Each of the ship’s officers were still positioned stiffly in the corners, each of them looking bored. Good—that meant his theft was still undiscovered. Before he could get caught watching, Sam looked back away.

By his best guess, he had fifteen minutes. Everyone in the engine room was still indisposed, so unless he got unlucky and someone stumbled upon them sooner… fifteen minutes. Sam took a draught from his glass, shaking his head in frustration.

How was he supposed to fill another fifteen minutes?

His eyes fell to his drink as he searched for an answer, but they slid up immediately at the sight of a figure sidling up beside him—a man. _Shit._

“Lottery winner?”

Sam tried to keep his face straight as he sized the stranger up, crossing off afflictions like a doctor listing symptoms.

_No colors, no uniform, no weapons—can’t be the Queen’s Guard, or an officer. Doesn’t look suspicious or dangerous, no sign of any metal-detecting tech…_

Just another guest, then.

Sam tried not to breathe his relief out loud.

“I’m sorry?” he asked one he recovered from the scare, polite as he could muster.

“I asked if you were a lottery winner,” the man repeated, lips curling up into an easy smile. His eyes looked pointedly over Sam before he jammed a thumb over his shoulder at the stiff dancers behind them. “Next to them, you look a little, ah, unadorned, if you catch my drift. Oh—no offense intended.”

The last part was tacked on almost like an afterthought, and if Sam was in fact who he was pretending to be, he probably would’ve been damned if he didn’t take offense. But Sam wasn’t. He _was,_ however, very out of his element, and very aware of the hunk of metal beneath his frock coat.

“Oh! Yes, that’s right.” Sam replied, face flushing a little when he realized he’d been staring a second too long. Sheepishly, he ducked his head. “I guess I don’t exactly fit in, do I?”

Even in all of Lucifer’s borrowed finery, he was still missing the pieces of the men around him had. The layers upon layers of fine fabrics—he was at least one, probably closer to two layers short—the fancy walking stick—he had none—a new gold wrist-watch—his was scuffed, an old hand-me-down covered in a fine layer of coal dust that never came off no matter how hard he scrubbed.

That was why he’d come as a doctor and not a socialite. He was someone respectable, someone belonging neatly to _Eden’s_ tiny middle-class, someone who no one would spare much of a second look at. That was the part he could play best with all he had at his disposal.

“Didn’t say that was a bad thing,” the man warmly reassured him, “I’m the same.”

A little of the fear in Sam’s heart ebbed. If he were to be caught, if the stranger _were_ to somehow see into his pocket, then that meant there was less chance he’d know what it was. And perhaps he’d even be sympathetic to Sam, kind enough to say nothing at all.

Then again, probably not.

“Well, if I were to introduce myself formally—which I’ve obviously already botched—I’d say I’m Mr. Novak, but if you don’t mind skipping the formalities, then just call me Novak.”

Now _that_ was more Sam’s language.

“Carmichael,” he offered, a little more laidback.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Novak offered, a little dryly, a little droll—certainly without the stiff conventions of high society. Even ill-bred and dirt poor as he’d once been, Sam knew better than to bring sarcasm into a conversation.

Sam looked Novak over as subtly as he could, readjusting his initial assessment.

The man—Novak—clearly had his fair share of money given his dress, but like Sam, he was missing the overdone embroideries and ritzy frills of everyone around them. So he was rich—or at least well-off—but not filthy rich. In short, exactly the kind of person who’d be privately arranged to win one of the wildcard tickets for the maiden voyage of Her Majesty’s dirigible—it wouldn’t do to have impoverished coal miners and factory workers clogging up the dance floor, after all.

His hair was just long enough to start curling at the nape of his neck, almost too long to be considered proper—not nearly as long as Sam's own, of course—and he held himself loosely, head lolled curiously to the side. If Sam didn't know otherwise, he might've thought he'd already had one drink too many—he looked too relaxed, too comfortable in his own skin among a sea of stiff, convention-driven machine people.

Of course, none of those minor details struck Sam quite as sharply as his eye—how he’d missed it earlier, Sam wasn’t sure. Novak’s left eye was normal, fine, entirely human, if not a tad brighter then Sam had seen on anyone before. On the other hand, his right eye was a feat of modern machinery—entirely mechanical, a series of gears and mechanisms turning and twisting swiftly about each other beneath a thin film of glass. The iris lacked a pupil, the pure glowing gold of phosphorus in its place, but still it flicked around the room like any other.

It was as unnerving as it was interesting, and Sam might’ve asked more about it if he didn’t think it’d be uncouth—for all he knew, it was a touchy subject. Miners spoke freely of their missing limbs and how they’d come to be blown off, but the middle-class of _Eden_ _?_ Well, that was something Sam knew a little less about.

And maybe it was indeed a touchier topic, because Novak caught him staring and just raised a wayward brow. Sam looked away, face flushing.

“So, ever been on one of these before?” Novak asked a moment later, flagging down the bartender with a wave of his hand and turning away from Sam for a moment. “Whiskey, please. Make it neat.”

“I’m afraid not,” Sam civilly answered, still doing his best to keep on his well-bred front. “I’ve been on a seaship before, but never an airship.”

“A lot of pomp, huh?” Novak’s hand moved to motion to their surroundings, but his eyes stayed rooted firmly on Sam. Under the bright gaslight of the ballroom, his eyes almost seemed to glow a shade brighter. Sam knew, somehow, that he was being tested, but he had no idea for what. “Must’ve come with quite the price tag.”

_Yeah,_ he silently agreed through gritted teeth, _you’re telling me._

But how…?

Sam’s face went blank. Did he _know?_

“It isn’t my place to speak on matters of the Royal Treasury,” was what Doctor Carmichael answered, voice carefully measured, face set impressively straight. “But Her Majesty deserves the best.”

It clearly wasn’t what Novak had wanted to hear, because he just made a vague _hmph_ sound and turned away. He seemed almost _disappointed._ Sam’s lips twisted down into a frown—what had he wanted him to say? He’d _thought_ Novak might have been onto to him, but… maybe he still was?

“Something wrong?” Sam asked, hasty to want to fix whatever he’d done wrong.

Novak’s eyes flicked back over to his, looking shockingly bored.

(If Sam were who he said he was, undoubtedly he would’ve been enraged by the entirety of their interaction by now, but he wasn’t a _perfect_ copy of the man he was pretending to be).

“Oh, nothing that’d interest you,” Novak boorishly answered, lifting his whiskey to his lips.

Sam’s brows drew together, curiosity momentarily outweighing his mission.

“I assure you, you have my attention.”

“Well, Mr. Carmichael—"

“Doctor Carmichael,” Sam gently corrected him, still clinging to his alias.

“Well, _Doctor_ Carmichael,” Novak repeated, looking like he was losing a fight to avoid rolling his eyes. “I apologize _sincerely_ if I’m breaking decorum by telling you, but I’m bored off my ass.”

Sam, even ill-bred as he was, had to fight to keep the shock off his face.

“No offense to you and the masses, of course,” he tacked on, arching a brow—and did he seemed almost _pleased_ at the reaction he’d stirred up?

“Why?” Sam inelegantly asked, a touch of _G’ehenna_ gracelessness seeping into his voice.

“There’s no story here,” Novak answered, heaving a dramatic sigh. “It’s all ceremony and etiquette and formality—and don’t get me wrong, I love glitz as much as anyone else—but everyone here’s got sticks so far up their asses they may as well be scarecrows. I mean, have you _tried_ talking to the Third Duke of _Parlouz?_ The mating dance just to _talk_ to him is half an hour long.”

Sam, despite himself, despite the severity of his situation and the danger he’d be if he made one wrong move… well, he actually laughed. He stifled it enough that it didn’t carry beyond their quiet corner, but Novak heard, and the interest in his eyes flared back up.

And then Novak’s words caught back up with him.

“Story?” he asked a moment later, chasing the sudden scratchiness of his throat away with a gulp of absinthe.

“I’m a journalist,” Novak disclosed, his grin growing conspiring. He leaned back, considering his glass of whiskey. “My editor arranged for me to win a ticket, write him a nice little puff piece on—oh, hell if I know. Modern fashion? Dancing? What assholes like to drink?” He pointed to Sam’s sickly green concoction as if to prove a point. “Whatever. He _knows_ I hate these things, but here I am. No story, surrounded by socialite assholes, and drinking something that my brother may as well have brewed.”

_Oh, there’s a story,_ Sam’s mind unhelpfully supplied. _In what, ten minutes?_

Ten minutes before the coal in the engine room started to dry up, before the dirigible started to lose steam, before they started to plummet down into the sea—and here Sam was, in front of a _journalist_ looking to score a story.

A journalist who now knew his face, knew the cover he’d come here under, who could identify him—oh, shit. Sam lifted a hand to his head, subtly pulling the brim of his hat a little further over his face. Christ, he’d never been so glad hats were in fashion—hopefully it’d give him at least a little cover.

Still, Sam needed out of here now.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Sam abruptly told him, and now the _G’ehenna_ accent in his voice was definitely audible to a trained ear. But before he could see if Novak had heard, before he could bluster his way across the room, there was a definite screech, piercing, and undeniably metallic.

_Shit._

The dancing stopped, confused faces looking around to see if anyone else had heard.

_Lucifer was going to have his ass._

Sam held his breath for a one-two count, mind ticking up to ten. The room was silent, anxious, but then the band began to play once more, and slowly, the couples began to dance again. The tension lifted slowly off the room as everyone brushed it off as the ship settling into its skin.

Sam exhaled.

“What was that?” Novak asked him, and when Sam turned, the man had the audacity to look _excited._

But before Sam could answer, brush it off, another screech deafened the room, and then the entire ship lurched, tilted, came to a halt with the floor tilted forty-five degree downwards.

Men and women and furniture alike scrambled to stay upright, screeching and shrieking filling the room as the unlucky ones tumbled to the ground, sliding down the incline. Dishes and glass shattered around him, and the deck straightened for just a moment before plunging a second time, at an even sharper angle this go around.

Sam was so shocked by the suddenness of it all— _and he’d known it’d happen, damnit—_ that he started to fall too, until Novak reached out to grab him by the collar. Sam jerked back into his grasp, scrambling to get ahold of the counter of the bar.

Sam barely managed to stagger back upright, eyes falling downwards to the bottom of the incline. At the far end of the once-luxurious dance floor was a tangle of hurt and panicked people, pinned by smashed musical instruments and broken furniture and shards of glass and china. Others were struggling back up the slope, blindly climbing up towards the door that led to the deck.

“Fucking shit,” Novak wheezed beside him, his foul language hidden by a swarm of cursing and cries. Sam’s eyes flicked over to him, landing on the trickle of blood dripping down the side of his head—a cut from a falling glass. Clumsily, Sam pulled the pocket square out from his suit to help him staunch the bleeding, but Novak waved him away. “I’m fine, I’m fine— _Christ!”_

His eyes lifted to Sam’s, the mechanical gold of his machine eye glowing a shade more intense. Sam could _hear_ the gears whirring under his skin.

“I think I found my story, Doctor,” he grinned, almost vicious in his glee. He looked down to the bottom of the slope, then jerked his head downwards. “You ought to get down there, see if you can treat some of those bruises. Now—you to your work and me to mine!”

Novak was already moving, half-skidding, half-sprinting down the slope, moving towards the door that would lead him to— _fuck. The engine room._

“Where are you going?” Sam asked, surprising both of them as he reached out, grabbing ahold of Novak’s arm to stop him short.

“Engine room!” he explained, easily breaking away. “That’s where the problem’s gotta be, and that’s where the action’s gonna happen!”

_Fuck._ Oh, _fuck._

If he went there, he’d see the engineers all tied-up and KO’d, realize that this was sabotage. Sam almost stopped him. But in the end, he stayed still. He’d planned on that—at least _eventually._

Even clueless and untrained as they were, Her Majesty’s officers would surely pin that as the source of the problem at _some_ point. It was all still going according to plan—maybe just a little faster than Sam would’ve liked.

Right. _Right_ —the plan.

Sam needed to get up to the deck, and he needed to have done it ten minutes ago, long before the ship had started its slide. Before that damn _reporter_ had distracted him—but fuck, he could be angry at himself later. This wasn’t the time. He still had his mission.

Already, people were fleeing upwards, like rats from a sinking ship. Sam could hide among them until the time was right, work out his next course of action.

Sam kept ahold of the counter, carefully working his way across the slope, helping people up and onto their feet and directing them up towards the deck whenever he could— _stupid choice,_ Lucifer would’ve told him, _they’re fine—and you won’t be if you get caught._

But Lucifer wasn’t here to drag him out of trouble this time. No, this was on him, and this was _important._ Too important to screw up, not when they’d been working towards something this big for _years._ Still, Sam stopped, ever-aware of the machine piece in his pocket.

And finally, he was on the deck, among a throng of frightened people.

Sam wondered how long it’d take them to notice that Her Majesty’s Imperial Dirigible, the HMS Titan, the product of a century’s worth of innovation—ten years of labor and the blood of a thousand dead workers woven into its seams—didn’t even have enough lifeboats for its passengers.

He was guessing two minutes.

Quickly, he got in line, passing out lifejackets—he’d studied their route for months to find the best time to snatch the regulator from the engine room. By now, they were halfway over the Channel, poised perfectly over the water. There’d be nowhere to land, nowhere to go but a sharp descent down, hard and fast. The parachute-lifeboats would be well and good enough if they were to _truly_ evacuate ship—if they’d built enough, of course—but the scene was chaotic, frantic.

Over the shrill howl of the wind, any word of advice or command the officers gave was drowned out before it could reach the ear of a single terrified passenger, and on the port-side of the ship, no lifeboats were being lowered at all. Something about the drastic angle in the ship had fouled the release lines, from what Sam could gather.

It was just what they’d been planning on—utter turmoil, ineffectual officers, and a frenzied crowd of passengers to witness it all, to flood to the newspapers with sharp-tongued criticisms of the Empire and its army the second the ship landed. Hell, it was even _better._

Sam kept himself busy repeating instructions, making sure lifejackets were fastened correctly.

And then there it was.

“There’s not enough lifeboats!” a woman’s shrill voice shrieked, and then the panic in the crowd doubled, tripled as everyone made their own counts, realized it was the truth.

The ship lurched again, sending people stumbling and crashing to their feet. Shrieks rose, people shoved to lifeboats, the officers were pushed clean out of the way. Pure, perfect chaos—just like and Lucifer had been counting on.

Sam carefully made his way over to the edge and peered over the railing. Slowly but surely, the dark blue of the channel was rising to meet them. Or they were falling to meet it, rather.

Now was a good a time as any.

“You!” a voice shouted, and—Sam spun around, realizing it was directed at him.

Bursting through the doors from below the deck was Novak, hair whipping about wildly in the wind. And his eyes were definitively focused on Sam.

It was too late, though.

Sam had the head start, and in an instant, he’d pushed through the crowd to a piece of clear deck atop the prow of the ship. Before anyone could stop him, he whipped out a pistol and aimed up.

“Nobody move!” Sam shouted, voice cutting through the clamor like a bell.

That was another funny thing about the airship, really. Too massive to contain the internal structures and engines below deck, someone somewhere along the lines had decided that it’d be a pragmatic choice to place the ship’s envelope on the exterior. And not _just_ on the exterior of the ship, but above the deck, where any idiot with a pistol could puncture the machinery, send the ship careening like a bullet down into the ocean—a lot of a lot faster than it’d sink if someone were just to, say, stolen the ship’s regulator from the engine room.

By anyone’s standards, it was a terrible design choice.

For Sam’s purposes, however, it was fantastic.

The entire deck went stone silent, all eyes on him. The shrill wind whistled harder across the deck, ripping the hat off his hand and sending his hair cascading down from where he’d had it pinned up all at once. It worked to his favor, though. The wind whipped his hair up and around his face, hiding it even more than the low brim of his hat.

_So much for keeping a low profile._

But Sam’s mind was elsewhere. He took another step backwards until his back pressed against the rail. No one could flank him now, not even if they were foolish enough to try—not that he’d have let them, of course.

_This is it. Your big moment. Eight years of work in the making—so don’t fuck it up._

“I didn’t come here to kill you!” Sam shouted over the wind, thrilled at the clear ring of his voice. “This ship may be an insult to every man, woman, and child slaving half-starved in the factories and mines of the _Elysian_ Empire, and I may love to see it at the bottom of the sea, but I didn’t come here to kill unlucky innocents who paid half a penny for a lottery ticket. After all, it’s not my fault that Her Majesty’s finest dirigible doesn’t even have enough lifeboats to evacuate all its passengers!”

Novak’s eyes were on him, burning bright enough that Sam froze, just for a moment—and then he set off into the final part of his speech, yanking the chunk of wire and metal from his coat and tossing it to the deck below.

_Remember what happened to them. This is what Dean would want._

“Remember that _we_ place more value on human life than the empire who built this ship.”

Sam lifted his chin, voice hard.

“Remember that the Morningstar is never out of sight.”

And before he could be stopped, before he could lose his confidence, he vaulted over the railing behind him and closed his eyes.

Then he fell.

He dropped like a rock for a second, then two— _c’mon, Charlie, c’mon—_ and then fire and flame shot from the bottom of his high-topped boots and he jerked upright in the air. He was flying—well, not exactly flying, but certainly not falling uncontrollably any longer. The water was well below him, the island of _Avalon_ a tiny figure in the distance—well within gliding distance, as long as Charlie’s boots held up on him. And knowing her, they would.

He glanced up and over his shoulder only once, and when he did, Novak’s eyes were on him, glowing gold in the dying light.

Sam looked away.

 


	2. The Politician

Sam hit the water hard and half a mile too far out, but foot by foot, stroke by stroke, he fought his way to shore. He hadn't made it this far, faced off against the entire empire, just to drown, after all. And so he made it, short a frock-coat, his vest, and half a dozen other accessories by the time his feet finally found a base of sand beneath them, but he was blessedly—hell, maybe even surprisingly—alive. Hell, _better_ than alive.

Sam let the sand sink under his fingernails as he drug his way into a sitting position, letting the waves break and crash up against his feet and barely kept the incredulous laugh in the back of his throat at bay.

“Christ,” Sam said to the empty beach, and then again, sharper. “ _Christ.”_

Slowly, he stumbled up onto his feet, over the rocky-sand shore and up to the gnarled tree line. Deeper within, he’d find the seaside town where he’d arranged to meet Ruby, get a lift back to the mainland on some illicitly-solicited ship, but that could wait a little while longer.

Sam sunk down onto the thin dirt, leaned back against the knobby bark of a palm and lifted his head to the sky. Off in the distance, just a speck in the sky—one he just as easily might have been imagining—he could make out the retreating silhouette of Her Majesty’s finest dirigible, slinking back to shore like a beaten dog—and a little to the west of that, the sun was a waxy sphere in the sky, sinking beneath the choppy waves of the sea.

Sam watched and sucked in a breath of fresh air—salty, clean, untouched by the choking smoke and acid of the factories that lined  _Eden’s_ streets, nothing like the thick, choking smog of the capital—and it was the farthest from home he’d ever been, and still he was reminded of it all at once. If it weren’t for the salty air and the sound of waves, he might’ve even mistaken the two.

But Sam was quick to steer his thoughts away from home, not wanting to sour his victory. After it, it’d been a damned good day—hell, maybe even the best he’d had since coming to _Eden_ to begin with. He was still freezing cold from the swim, still sapped from the effort, probably running on nothing but adrenaline, but he’d _done_ it. Even lived to cage drinks from the story.

There was still work to do—there always was—but Sam could spare a second to rest for now, enjoy the sun’s dying rays and the murmur of the sea. Not every day was the same, but today?

Well, today was a damned good day to be alive.

 

* * *

 

It ended up being two days before Ruby had been able to commission them someone sufficiently shady to take them home with no questions asked, and half of another before they'd found a train to take back to the capital. Late that night, Sam had stumbled back onto _Eden’s_ streets, and from there, he’d gone straight to Lucifer’s—an unnecessary provision, as it turned out, because by then the news had long since spread even to the far reaches of the empire.

Lucifer, always so untouchable atop his pedestal, had even  _smiled_ at him—a cool, diffident thing, but a smile nonetheless. Sam could count the number of times he’d seen Lucifer smile in all of eight years with a single hand, and only once had it been at something other than the sight of an enemy meeting a particularly gruesome downfall.

And not only had he smiled, but he’d smiled at _him._

“Well done,” Lucifer had praised him, his hand falling atop a thick stack of collected newspapers. “It’s a shame you didn’t see the Prime Minister’s public address yesterday—watching the vultures swarm was  _delightful.”_

In the moment, Sam had only managed an exhausted noise of acknowledgment, but after a good night’s sleep, Sam could only imagine.

The political cartoons in the paper were nothing short of acidic, and by the week’s end, not a single man, woman, or child within the whole of the  _Elysian_ Empire hadn’t heard of the dirigible’s flagrant safety violations, the incompetence of the crew, the sorry excuse for security that’d allowed Sam to waltz unstopped into the engine room.

If it weren’t for his sudden fame, it all would’ve been perfect. But as it was, Lucifer  _politely_ told (read:  _ordered)_ him to spend the next few weeks holed up in his apartment until the worst of the storm passed over. So, he’d spent the past five days in house arrest, only allowed the occasional company from other  _Morningstar_ members.

Sam thought it was a little much, really—yes, his face was in every issue of news in the capital, but consistency? If one paper described him as one of the blond mountain men of the Northwest, then the next said he was a black-haired man of the Southern colonies. Hell, the only thing anyone could seem to agree on was that he was tall—and even then, no one could agree on just  _how_ tall.

“I like this one,” Charlie laughed from the other end of the kitchen table. Sam looked up from his breakfast, irritation creasing his face as she realized which article she was reading. “It says here that…  _Ms. Pearlsen,_ an eyewitness accountof  _Eden_ origin _,_ described the attacker as a hulking brute of at least seven foot eight.”

At least his friends were keeping him company during his house arrest stint.

“It’s only been a week, and I’m already immortalized as Frankenstein’s monster,” Sam dryly lamented.

“Oh, come on. I’ve seen at least a few reports that describe you as ‘ _angelic’_ or ‘ _classically attractive,’_ you know.” Sam had read those too—he’d been doing a lot of that, since it wasn’t like there was much else to do while he was on lockdown. It probably wasn’t the best habit, come to think of it. Some of the articles _really_ favored style over substance.

Although he did still have one that’d called him classically attractive. Purely for commemorative purposes, of course.

“Still,” Sam protested, sighing indignantly.

“Well, to be fair, you  _are_ freakishly tall,” Charlie replied, betraying him.

“I’m six four,” Sam protested.

“Yeah, and the platforms in my boots would’ve brought you to at least six foot six. Sorry, but I’ve gotta side with the papers on this one.” She just grinned at the look Sam spent her, and they fell back into an easy silence until she finished reading and set the paper down. “But I guess semantics aren’t really important. It doesn’t matter which way you spin it—it’s a shitty week to be a tall guy with long hair.”

And Sam’s hair wasn’t  _that_ long, either. Hell, before  _Elyisa_  had steamrolled over  _G’ehenna_ , his chin-length locks would’ve paled in comparison to those of other men, but, well, there was only so much anyone could do to keep tradition alive.

“Oh!” Charlie exclaimed, recapturing his attention. “I forgot to ask about the friend you made.”

She reached into her pocket, sliding him a half-torn off chunk of paper. Sam had just enough time to shoot her a confused look before she dropped her finger to the top of the paper, pointing to a smeared blot of ink that wrote a name Sam recognized.

_G Novak._

“Shit,” Sam groaned, head falling back. He hadn’t said anything too incriminating, of course, but still _._ Whatever this was about, it was going to be painful. And if Lucifer got ahold of it…  _fuck._ “Where’d you find this?”

Maybe he’d strike gold, and it’d be from a tiny independent press. Or maybe it’d been buried under half the Sunday edition, right where no one but the most dedicated readers would find it.

“Front page of the  _Eden_   _Herald_ ,” Charlie answered, and Sam tried not to curse loud enough for the neighbors to overhear.

Of course he’d just  _accidentally_ happen upon a journalist while he was committing light treason, and not only would said journalist have a full conversation with him, but he’d just  _also_ happen to work for the biggest newspaper in the capital—and just as naturally, he’d have written the article that made the Sunday’s edition front page.

Christ, Sam was never going to get out of here, was he?

Roughly, he folded the paper back up and crammed it into his pocket to deal with later.

“Anyways, that’s enough on how you’re a celebrity now,” Charlie said, taking his cue. “I’ve been waiting all week to hear how my boots worked. C’mon, I want to take a look.”

Well, Sam wasn’t exactly looking forwards to getting dragged into an interrogation on his angle of descent from the dirigible or on the specifics of fuel exhaust, but he  _was_ happy enough to do anything that’d get his house arrest off his mind.

“I’ve got them stashed in the back,” he said, standing and motioning for her to follow.

   

* * *

 

 

It was well into the evening before Charlie left, leaving Sam to his boredom. He worked on a few of his own personal projects for a while—refurbishing an old pocket watch, rebuilding an old music box—nothing too exciting, but enough to keep him entertained for a while. And when he got tired of staring at gears and cogs, he stood to dim the gaslights in his room to get ready for bed.

It was only as he was getting undressed that the article from earlier slipped from his pocket, cascading neatly to the floor by his bedside. Sam had half the mind to leave it there, but if the talk was already out there, the rumors already swirling, he’d be just as well to get out ahead of them, figure how to improve his disguise, his acting—whatever—for his next big job.

Sam picked the paper up.

The first bit of the article was surprisingly standard-fare given how Novak had talked to him in person, but as it wore on, his trademark insolence started to shine through a little more.

_Like my own, his clothes were of a notably poorer make than our peers, a clear sign of a lottery winner… The design of the ship had military stupidity written all over it—really, who builds a ship that can’t dump enough coal to stay afloat when only missing a single piece?... As I searched for the saboteur on the deck, my eyes went back to him, and I noted the odd make of his boots—better suited to a horse race than a high-society ballroom… After his diatribe, I raced back to the engine room with the regulator and with the aid of the engineer’s assistant and one of the ship’s more effective officers, managed to reattach the regulator and undo another few bouts of saboteur-induced damage before Her Majesty’s finest dirigible ended its maiden voyage at the bottom of the Channel._

Still, Sam had to at least  _kind_ of admire the guy. Everyone else on the ship had proven themselves useless, after all, and if Sam really had intended to see the ship at the bottom of the sea, it probably would’ve been just as well Novak had been on board.

And besides, in some alternate universe where Sam had actually ended up following his planned career path, they might even have become friends. But of course, all that wondrous disregard for the trappings of high society and irreverence had been wasted on a _journalist_.

Even so, Sam couldn’t help but to at least be a little fond of him anyways.

At least until he reached the end of the article, that was.

 _Dangerous, seditious nonsense—all of it. Traitors to the ideals that have long since been the pillar of Elysian society may as well be the same as our Avernian enemies to the East—_ Sam’s throat went tight, and abruptly, he let the paper fall to his side.

He was a bastard, from the borderlands, maybe not always as good of a person as he put on, but he wasn’t one of them—never. Even if he’d been one of them once, he wasn’t like them.

He wasn’t _._

“Imperialist asshole,” Sam muttered, trying to ignore the sudden shake in his hands.

With his jaw gritted tight, Sam tore the paper up and threw it into the trash.

_Don’t think about it. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know._

Fuck, Sam really hoped Lucifer hadn’t seen that article.

But of course, he had—it’d been on the front page of the empire’s most widely circulated newspaper, and Lucifer was many things, but an idiot never had been one of them.

When Lucifer summoned Sam the next day, a copy lifted in his hand as he walked in and both brows raised, Sam couldn’t fight off the wave of nausea that filled him. Lucifer stopped midway through a sentence Sam hadn’t heard over the blood in his ears, and the paper fell to his side.

“At any rate, I suppose we should leave the dirigible business behind for a while,” he smoothly went on, changing topics.

There were times when Sam despised how easily Lucifer could read him, like he was nothing more than an open book when he’d spent nearly his whole life trying to be the opposite. This wasn’t one of those times.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed through a scratchy throat, realizing Lucifer was waiting for a reply. “Sounds good.”

Lucifer’s chair scraped against the floor as he spun around, thoughtfully steepling his fingers.

“I’m sure you know Parliament elections will be reaching their peak soon…” he finally begun, and Sam already knew just where the conversation was going to go.

   

* * *

 

There were days that Sam liked working for Lucifer. Those were the days like the one on the dirigible, the days where he could feel himself making a difference. A steady hand on the rudder might eventually turn a ship, but Sam wasn’t half as patient as he put on because he’d learned himself that sabotage and, say, blackmail turned a ship around a hell of a lot quicker.

Days when he saw that idea put into practice where the days he liked working for Lucifer best.

And then there were days like these, where Sam was soaked to the bone in near-freezing temperatures, absolutely slathered in mud, and still probably at least two feet away from digging up the body he was looking for. And that was only  _if_ his man had been right. If it wasn’t, and Sam had just spent the past four hours desecrating some unlucky worker’s grave, he might just lose his shit and call it quits on this for the year.

The constable’s beat was due to come by the cemetery in another… he stopped digging to check his scratched-up watch… four minutes, and Sam  _really_ didn’t want to have to go prone down into the half-dug grave again to stay out of sight. Especially on the off-chance that he was starting to get close to a corpse. His body was rigid with misery as he drove his spade back into the dirt. Five weeks of skulking around the East End chasing ghosts of leads had led him here, hunting down the latest victim of dirty politics. By now, he was frustrated with his lack of progress, exhausted from overexertion from being on his feet so long, and an hour from coming down with frostbite, but at least his hands and feet were too cold to hurt any longer.

Idly, Sam wished that he’d invited Ruby to come along. She probably would’ve spent just as much time crowing at him from the lip of the dug-up grave as she would’ve helping, but even that would’ve been _something_.

And maybe it was just the first hints of frostbite talking, but Sam was kind of starting to get chills, what with being alone in an overcrowded graveyard past dark and all. He wasn’t superstitious by any means, but being there past dark—well, there was something about atmosphere, superstition or not.

It didn’t help that Sam was digging up a dead body, even if it wasn’t the one he was looking for. It probably said something about Sam that this was something like the twentieth grave he’d desecrated in the past decade, but he didn’t really want to know what.

Sam sighed, stopping to lean on his shovel, and just as quickly forcing himself to straighten before he could convince himself to give up entirely. As hard as he could, he struck his shovel into the dirt, only to have it slow as hit something hard with an odd  _shunk._ Unlike the hundred thousand rocks he’d hit, however, this one actually gave, buckling under his shovel.

Sam’s face curled into a frown and he leaned over, then instantly regretted it. He fell ungracefully backwards into the grave with a gag. Instinctually, he scrambled out of the hole, swallowing down bile all the way. Christ, he was never going to get that out of his head.

Fuck, he _hated_ politicians.

It took a few moments of breathing the smog-thick air before he finally collected himself enough to pull his bulky camera from the plastic rain-protecting cover, and another minute of steeling himself before he finally lowered himself back into the grave.

Two minutes ‘til the constable came by on his rounds.

Sam could snap his pictures, get the grave filled in under half an hour—that was the easy part, thankfully—and be back to give Lucifer his report before morning.

Hopefully bringing good news would be enough to offset the fact that’d Sam had been avoiding him recently, still sure that  _this_ would finally be the year he brought his target down, even though Lucifer would’ve been ready to reassign him to more fruitful projects weeks ago.

Sam couldn’t help that he had a personal stake in this one, though. He’d been trying to take down this particular prick for just as long as he’d been working for Lucifer, after all.

“Fucking politicians,” Sam muttered around his flashlight, biting down hard as he steadied the light with his teeth. Carefully, he adjusted his daguerreotype, snapping a series of pictures before the dull  _clip-clop_ of the constable’s horses on cobblestone could be heard at the end of the street, marking his latest round. Sam made sure to get one last good picture of the corpse’s face—or was what left of it after the bullet and decay had set in—and then climbed out, carefully tucking his camera back under his coat.

As the horse’s beat drew nearer, Sam flicked off his flashlight and leveled himself even with the ground to hide. He was even in good enough humor not to notice the wet squelch of mud around him. Finally, the constable moved on, and he stood once more.

Energy restored, he had the grave filled within fifteen minutes, and the end of the hour saw him slinking into Lucifer’s current safehouse—a poorly lit apartment above just the sort of tavern that thrived on bad lighting, nestled neatly within the nastiest part of the East End.

Sam rapped twice at the door in the specific code Lucifer had assigned him that month, and only had to wait half a minute before he answered—somehow fully-clothed, even despite the late hour. Sam had long since learned it was rarer not to be surprised by Lucifer than anything else, so he took it in stride, not even letting the question form on his tongue.

“Did you get into a brawl on the riverbank?” Lucifer dryly asked, disdainfully motioning for Sam to take off his filthy overcoat before letting him inside. “Or is there another reason why you’re showing up outside my door at three in the morning after weeks of avoiding me?”

“Well, I couldn’t desecrate a grave in broad daylight,” Sam replied, matching Lucifer’s wryness word for word. He gravitated instantly towards the smoldering logs in the fireplace, unbuttoning the first few buttons of his shirt as he tried to shake off the wet cold of the night. “And I  _haven’t_ been avoiding you.”

It was an outright lie, of course, and Lucifer called him out with a silent look that Sam steadfastly pretended not to have seen as he warmed himself up.

“Well?” Lucifer expectantly asked, crossing his arms.

Sam turned back to him and managed a grin through his fatigue, producing his camera.

“Where can you get these produced without someone asking you why you’ve got pictures of a dead body, and how long will it take?”

Lucifer was across the room in a second, the camera vanishing from Sam’s hands and into his just as fast. He turned it over in his hands, the spitting image of the cat that got the cream. It was an unusually strong reaction considering Lucifer’s usual dedication to his unruffled nonchalance, but Sam figured Lucifer had been working this project for just as long as him—if not longer.

“Brilliant work, Sam,” Lucifer praised him. He looked up, lips twisting into a conspiring smirk. “And to think our delightful Prime Minister  _endorsed_ him for the past three elections… at any rate, I suppose I should see to having these developed—and then about arranging a meeting.”

Sam tried to smile, but with his mission accomplished, he was suddenly very aware of how he was swaying on his feet, half a second away from collapsing from exhaustion.

Lucifer picked it up just as quickly.

“There’s a spare bedroom to the left in the hall,” Lucifer told him, already heading towards the door despite the time. “Go and rest while I get these developed.”

Usually, Sam would’ve insisted on going with him if only just to make sure the evidence made it wherever it needed to go safely, but he also knew that Lucifer was just as capable with a pistol as him—if not more—and exhaustion had weaved its way into his bones. Too tired to argue, he agreed with a small noise and stumbled down the hall into the bed, half a grin still on his face.

That night, Sam slept soundly.

And that was how, two days later, Sam ended up in the personal office of a member of Parliament two days later, under the hastily-constructed guise of one Mr _._ Westlake _,_ a questionable  _nouveau_ **-** _riche_  businessman from one of the Empire’s inner territories—exactly the kind of slime with an interest in keeping the dirty politicians of the world in power, and exactly the kind of slime that funded the very same campaigns that kept them there.

Sam slipped into his three-piece suit—newly tailored and hand-sewn, a gift from Lucifer after his success on the dirigible—and pulled his hair into a tightly coiled bun atop his head before concealing it under a fashionable, if not a little dingy, hat of his own.

(Sometimes he half-wondered if it’d just be easier to chop off his hair into a more cosmopolitan style altogether—nothing decried him as a foreigner quite like his too-long locks, after all—but no matter how many times he stared at a pair of scissors, he never quite made the first cut.)

Sam straightened his tie, then turned away from the foyer room mirror just in time for the conservatively-dressed typist to emerge from upstairs, a polite smile pasted on her face.

“Mr. Westlake,” she greeted him, motioning for him to follow.

She took him through a rabbit’s warren of hallways to a grand oak with a plaque that read  _Dick Roman,_ where he dismissed her with a gracious  _thank you._

Alone, Sam inhaled a sharp breath of something piney and then rapped thrice on the door until a silken smooth voice told him,

“Come in.”

And into the lion’s den Sam went, off to match wits with his old enemies once more.

The office was every bit as gaudy as Sam would’ve expected. Exotic animal pelts lined the floor in front of a roaring fireplace, and the sheer amount of gold present in the room could’ve fed Sam’s family for a decade— _well, back when you still had one._

Sam swallowed the bitter taste in the back of his throat, shaking it away. He had a job to do. There was no time for that right now.

“Mr. Westlake, is it?” Dick Roman asked, flashing him a smile that was whiter than any human’s teeth had a right to be. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Sam replied, plastering the most convincing smile onto his face as he could. He tilted his head back towards the door. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

 _Yeah, I didn’t think you would,_ Sam dryly thought, though he kept his loathing to himself until he turned his back to get the door. Then, face turned, he had to remind himself that a politician was only as useful to him—to  _Morningstar—_ as long as they were alive.

But that didn’t mean he wanted to spend any more time here than he had to.

“I’m a busy man, so I hope you won’t find it curt of me to cut to the point.” Sam reached into his frock coat as he turned and withdrew his envelope. “I have a business proposition for you, Mr. Roman. I think we’ll both find it mutually beneficial once we settle on terms.”

He crossed the length of the room and dropped the envelope onto the desk, slid it across the polished oak desk, then settled into the plush chair across from him.

Dick Roman picked it up, breaking the seal with a fancy letter opener—seriously, what kind of fucking asshole used a  _letter opener? —_ and one-by-one, pulled out Sam’s snapshots while he watched carefully, scanning for the first sign of trouble.

Right up until realization struck, the politician’s face registered nothing but confusion. And then his face went carefully blank, a well-practiced mask falling into place.

Neatly, Dick Roman bundled the photos back together and set them down.

“Where did you get these?”

“Well, I thought that was obvious—the graveyard, clearly,” Sam drolly answered.

Huh. Backtalking a member of Parliament—now  _that_ was something he never would’ve gotten to do if he hadn’t left home. And he certainly wouldn’t be able to shove one into his pocket, either. What an opportunity-rich city _Eden_ was.

“So,” Dick Roman began to answer, sending chills down Sam’s spine with the ice in his voice, “Would it be safe to assume that  _you’ve_ been the thorn in my side this week?”

Sam was silent, but his mouth must’ve given him away, because Dick Roman’s eyes just went colder. And then they warmed back up, like the first day of spring chasing away winter’s frost. His face was faux-warm, unnervingly friendly—the face of a politician caught on the wrong end of a camera.

“You’ve caused me quite a bit of trouble, you know. Now, what will it take to make all this go away?” He leaned over, pulling open a drawer to withdraw a checkbook. “I’ll start with a one. Tell me how many zeroes you’d like to follow it, and we’ll go from there.”

Sam’s lips curled up.

“I don’t want money,” he spat.

Dick Roman looked up, faux-kind façade cracking where his smile didn’t reach his eyes. So, they both hated each other equally, then—the dirty politician and the so-called agitator, together in the same room, bonded by nothing except a shared animosity.

Sam tried not to recoil at the thought that they hated something in common.

“Do you happen to recall an incident involving a dirigible earlier this month?” he mildly asked.

And then understanding dawned, that this was more than just money, that this was a situation that Sam couldn’t be bought out of—and Sam hadn’t ever done any of this for the fame, but it was sure as shit nice to finally be recognized.

“Her Majesty’s dirigible saboteur,” Dick Roman realized, surprise flashing across his face before he managed to smooth it into something more suitable. “Well, then you’d do better to take the money while I’m still feeling generous. You have quite the bounty on your head, you know.”

“Do I?” Sam insolently asked, half-pleased at the idea.

“Enough to make your friends think twice about whether they prefer you alive and sabotaging government property or as a single-lump sum,” he promised Sam, “And I just so happen to know which direction to point you in if you’d like to meet the people that can see to it that said bounty goes away. Now, the check?”

Sam didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again if he so much as considered it.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to.

Sam wasn’t like the coin-heavy businessmen of the capital and its colonies, he wasn’t like the monsters that called themselves men from the  _Avernus_ Empiretotheeast, he wasn’t like the coldhearted people in his power who could be swayed by nothing more than a heavy wallet, and he  _never_  would be—not on his life.

Anything less, and he may as well be spitting on his brother’s grave.

The thought of selling out didn’t even cross his mind, and so Sam leaned back with a water-thin smile on his lips to serve as his response.

It wasn’t the answer Dick Roman had wanted to hear.

“Then remind me, what am  _I_ doing to make you cooperative?”

_What aren’t you doing? I’ve got you._

“The Labor Reform Bill,” Sam said instead, hands slamming down onto the desk between them. “They’re starting to draft the first copy in the next few weeks. Not only are you going to support it fullheartedly, but you’re also going to make sure our list of demands is on it.”

Sam was a second too late, because it was only half of one before he was blinking down the barrel of a gun, and where had— _when he pulled out the checkbook, idiot!_

His fingers twitched towards the revolver tucked into his frock coat, but he resisted the urge. He was point-blank, two feet away from the barrel of a gun. Even a blind man would be able to shoot him before he had it half-drawn. But Sam had leverage, he’d practiced for this, he could keep his head on straight long enough to talk himself out of this— _he would._ There wasn’t another option, not if he didn’t want to leave the room wrapped in a carpet.

Sam stilled, letting adrenaline flush the fear from his system, and stared him down.

This was no different from what he’d done on the dirigible. It was only a different kind of battlefield, one where the minefields weren’t quite as well-concealed. He had no timetable looming over him, none of the entrapments of high society—here he could just be Sam Winchester, rebel from the wrong end of the empire with no good-standing to speak of.

All there was to stop him was the gun in his face, and Sam had faced worse odds before.

And maybe he’d been in over his head just as much then as he was now, but he was still standing, and that had to count for something.

“Are these the only copies?” Dick Roman asked.

Like Sam was really going to bend to threats after even money hadn’t moved him. Like Sam hadn’t already gone against the whole damn empire, a whole damn ship of the army’s officers, and come out on top without so much as a scratch.

“I came here  _alone._  If you really think I brought my only copies with me, then you’re twice as stupid as I thought,” Sam replied, detachment descending over him like a cloak,  _fight_ beating out  _flight._ “I have friends all over the city, and I think you can guess what’ll happen if I don’t come home happy.”

“I’ll kill them too.”

“Not in time, you won’t,” Sam promised, surprising even himself with the sheer ice in his voice. “Not once they know you’re coming. Even if you  _do_ get your hands dirty, it’ll be too late.”

Bravado overwhelmed his better sense of self-preservation, and foolishly, stupidly even, Sam just leaned forwards, drawing even closer to the business end of Roman’s pistol.

“Shoot me,” Sam challenged him, adrenaline singeing the blood as it flowed through his veins. “I may not be around to see what happens once they send those pictures to every press in the empire, but youwill. So, Mr. Roman, whose bluff do you want to call?”

Sam held his breath.

Five seconds, then ten. Fifteen.

And then, finally, the gun in his face lowered just a little—still high enough to blow off his jaw if Dick Roman so chose to do so, but since it wasn’t aimed straight at his skull any longer, well… Sam would just have to take what he could get.

And it was an opening, so he took it.

The folded piece of paper came out from his pocket. Evenly, Sam slid it across the table, keeping his face steely even as Dick Roman’s twisted with disgust.

Silence was tangible, but only for a moment—and then the politician folded, disdainfully plucking Lucifer’s list off the table, face curling with antipathy as he read it over.                          

“You can’t be serious,” he finally blanched, shaking his head. “My name wouldn’t even make next election’s ballot if I entertain this garbage—let alone if I  _support_ it.”

Sam was unsympathetic, and he made damn well sure he showed it.

Dick Roman stared him down, and for a second Sam thought the last thing he’d see was a bullet coming towards his face, photos or not. But he’d dug his grave, and there was nothing to do but stand in it and wait to see what happened.

It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but for Sam, he might as well have been back ten thousand feet in the air on a dirigible, lying in wait.

But then the gun came down, and Sam had to try not to sigh as his adrenaline started to cool.

“Can I assume we’ve reached an agreement, then?” Sam asked, raising himself to his feet.

“You may have my support—at least in public,” Dick Roman answered, voice dripping in contempt. “But you’ll never get your damned bill. If you were truly a businessman, you’d know that all your proposed changes would bring _Elysian’s_ economy to its knees.”

“It’s the principle of the matter,” Sam blithely replied, unwilling to let his victory be spoiled.

And maybe Dick Roman was right—the bill hadn’t passed in the near-decade Sam had been working towards it, but every year, through blackmail and bribery and every other means of influencing, the climb uphill had gotten a little less steep. Besides, one term in Parliament lasted four years, and Sam planned on bleeding Dick Roman dry for every damned one of them.  _That_ was worth celebrating.

“Of course,” the politician condescendingly conceded, “Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t expect a terrorist to understand matters of a policy.”

Sam knew he was pushing his luck, but still, he leaned over to take Dick Roman’s pistol with him.

“Oh, and I’ll take this as a personal bonus,” he offhandedly remarked, turning on his heels and heading for the door. Over his shoulder, Sam threw one last dry, “I look forwards to working with you.”

And then he was out the door and lost to the crowded streets below, an insolent grin finding its way onto his face as he went.

                

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am a starving artist and i feed off of kudos and praise left in the form of comments
> 
> thank you for reading!!


	3. Alighieri Steamworks

               

Sam debated the wisdom of adding a Novak article to his bulletin wall, but the title was too entertaining for him not to pin up. _Dick Flags on Campaign Promises—_ soulless imperial reporting or not, that was golden, if only because Novak had somehow gotten it through the empire’s proofreaders.

Maybe they were too dense, too deprived to stoop low enough to spot juvenile humor? Or maybe they’d let it pass through as a mere concession, given that the rest of the article was nothing but canned, regurgitated statements about the dangers of reform, boilerplate decrials of those who betrayed the empire’s ideals—so on and so forth in a pattern Sam had read ten thousand times before.

It was a mystery, but one way or another, up on Sam’s wall it went.

A swell of pride rose up in his chest when it took a moment to find an empty space to pin it to—he usually tried to swallow it, of course, but some days humility came easier than others.

Today, it wasn’t coming easily, but he’d let himself have it— _today_. Because today, he’d woke up to a dozen articles on his doorstep, each one of them criticizing Dick Roman more harshly than the least— _turncoat, traitor, senseless idealism._ Today was a damned good day.

Sam stepped back from his board and let his eyes sweep over the motley patchwork of newspaper clippings and photos and painstakingly copied letters—the cumulation of eight years of odd jobs and errands run for _Morningstar,_ of nights spent skulking in the East End’s vilest stews and disreputable bars—and let himself have his pride, if only for a moment.

And then he started to get ready for work, because pride in himself was all well and good, but pride wouldn’t protect him from Ellen Harvelle if he dared to show up more than a few minutes late.

Fifteen minutes saw Sam walking into her bar. It was right on the fringes of where the East End melded into a more palatable part of town, and as it just so happened, it got business from both sides.

For Sam’s purposes, it was perfect.

Lucifer paid his board, took care of all his living arrangements, even paid him a modest stipend to offset most of his expenses, but there was nothing quite as valuable as having a physical presence in a neighborhood, and that was only something that could be bought with trust and time.

The alcohol helped, and it definitively helped that Sam was the one dispensing it.

So, during the nights of the week that Sam didn’t spend chasing down dirty politicians or planning treason of some degree, he played the part of the neighborhood’s bartender. It was hardly heart-pounding, but it paid for what Lucifer didn’t, and, well, there was no better place to find people unhappy with the status quo than those drinking their troubles away.

And so, the people in the East End had come to know Sam, to know that if there was a certain kind of below-the-table-business to be done, he was the one to come to for help.

The word _Morningstar_ was never spoken aloud, of course, but the connection was there for anyone who was willing to make it.

(And sure enough, Ellen had given him a hard look the day after the dirigible incident, but then her eyes had flicked over to mantle, to the photo of her late husband—dead since their daughter had only been a baby, something to do with a factory, if Sam remembered right—and Ellen hadn’t asked.)

So, Sam had his job, and the East Enders who wanted what he could offer had him. All things considered, it was just about the best deal Sam could’ve gotten.

“Good evening, Miss Harvelle,” he greeted Ellen as he took up his place behind the bar.

A rag snapped reprovingly against his arm, barely light enough to still be considered playful.

“What have I told you about calling me that?” Ellen scolded him, but good humor was written into her face despite the sharpness in her voice. “It’s _Ellen,_ or you’re out of a job.”

It was a worn-out argument, so Sam just smiled faux-sheepishly and turned his attention to the crowd. It was busy as a Tuesday night ever got, but aside from a few foreign faces mixed amicably in with the regulars, Sam saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, it never hurt to ask.

“Anything interesting for me?”

Ellen’s lips pursed, face drawing up tight. Something _had_ happened, then. His eyes were back on the crowd instantly, scanning every person thoroughly for anything he’d missed.

“What was it?” Sam questioned, hand falling instinctively to his waistband, hovering just over where his pistol was always concealing—something that wasn’t lost on her.

“Don’t go starting a duel in my bar,” Ellen reprimanded him, voice just low enough not to reach the ears of any of the patrons. She swatted his hand away, then tilted her head towards the door. “I told him to get the hell out an hour ago—politely, of course. He hasn’t been back since.”

“Who’s _he_?”

“Didn’t get his name, but he sure as hell wasn’t from here. Came around asking about your little club. Didn’t even have the brains to be subtle about it either, just came right up and asked if I knew anything about it or could point him towards someone who would.”

Sam’s shoulders dropped, if only a little. There’d always been the occasional stray incident of upper-enders or cops trying to skim the natives for information after _Morningstar_ pulled one of their bigger stunts, and, well, the dirigible incident was just about as big as they’d ever gone. Of course, there was always the chance it was just someone too senseless to take a subtle approach to joining a rebel group, but Sam figured if that was the case, they’d be better off without the person anyways.

It probably wasn’t even worth all the worry he was sparing to begin with. East Enders were a suspicious bunch to begin with, and Lucifer was easily the wariest of them all.

“What’d he look like?” Sam asked. It’d be easy enough to blacklist someone with a description, save anyone who happened across him the trouble. _Morningstar_ was about as faceless and seemingly unorganized as a group could get, but if he gave Lucifer a name or a face, there wouldn’t be a man or woman in the East End who didn’t know about them by the end of the hour. 

“Short. Light-haired. Dressed too nice for this part of town—and he had some kind of watch-eye shoved into his skull. Don’t know how he got a foot in the door without anyone robbing him.”

Sam stopped short, tensing up. There was only one person he’d met with an eye like that. It could always be a coincidence all the other traits Ellen listed matched—fair hair was common in this part of the empire, as was the malnutrition that led to people barely cracking average height—but the eye was a nail in the coffin.

“Don’t suppose his eyes were gold?” Sam dryly asked, figuring he may as well be sure before he did anything rash.

The way Ellen’s mouth twisted was answer enough.

“He a friend of yours?”

“We’ve met,” was all Sam would confess, eyes flicking anxiously to the door. At Ellen’s expectant look, he dryly added, “He’s a journalist,” and watched as distaste bubbled up on her face.

It was a mutual thing among East Enders.

“Well, if his plan is to scout out every bar in the area, he’s not gonna get very far—not looking like that, anyways. And you know just as well as I do that there’s a dozen bars within spitting distance of here, not to mention the rest of the East End.”

Sam was pretty sure he made a vague sound of agreeance, but the thought haunted him through the rest of his shift. He didn’t like the idea of an imperial reporter skulking around the East End. He liked it even less that said reporter could recognize him, could point at him and tell the people who’d have him hung that he knew something about _Morningstar._

It was irrational, maybe. _Eden_ was a city of over a million, and nowhere held more people than the overcrowded slums of the East End. The chances of Novak finding him made looking for a needle in a haystack look like child’s play—then again, he _had_ found Sam’s bar, hadn’t he?

Maybe Sam would see if Lucifer could find him someplace cheap down in the modestly-more reputable South Side for a few months. That’d probably be far enough to get him out of the reporter’s search radius. Of course, then he’d have to cope with having shopkeepers and professors for neighbors instead of his fellow disreputable men and women, and _that’d_ be another beast all in its own—and more than that, the East End was home. As close to home as Sam could get, anyways.

Well, Novak would get discouraged. There’d be more lucrative stories to move onto eventually, after all. If there was anything Sam had learned from years of reading the papers, it was that the empire’s attention was fickle.

Already, memories of the dirigible were sinking into the background of most people’s memories. Which almost certainly meant that Lucifer would be getting ready to reveal his next move for _Morningstar_ —and this time, Sam would check twice before he struck up a conversation with someone _._

  

* * *

 

 

Life as usual went on in for a few weeks—nights working at the bar, running the occasional menial errand for _Morningstar_ , a spare few hours a day to work on his personal projects. Even the East End itself seemed bizarrely quiet—no string of murders, no strikes or raids brewing in its ever-churning underbelly.

It left Sam at loose ends.

(Inevitably, it said something about him that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself when there wasn’t something criminal to occupy his attention, but he wasn’t sure just what that was—or if he wanted to know.

Sam passed the time in wait for the summons from Lucifer he knew would come—and it took all of three weeks before it finally did.

Hardly past the crack of dawn, two sharp raps drew Sam’s attention up from his desk to the door. He’d been up since four, nightmares waking him— _the mechs marched through the streets, facesless machines peering down at him with cannon-fire cracking from their arms_ —and rose to answer the door in an instant.

Work gave him something else to think about.

Sam answered the door in under ten seconds with hardly as much as a greeting before he was back inside, and Ruby walked through the opened door with arched brows.

“Eager, aren’t you?” she wryly asked, looking on as Sam quickly gathered his things—frock coat, journal, pistol—it never hurt to leave without them, after all. She took a pointed step towards him, lips curling into a smirk. “How do you know I’m here for business?”

Sam glanced over to her, and—well, he knew _that’d_ be a perfectly good distraction too, but after what felt like months of being cooped up, he was craving a different adrenaline hit.

“It’s morning,” he answered her, tilting his head towards the window and to the grey-streaked sky beyond. “You hate mornings.”

“Could just be the end of a long night,” she pointed out.

“Not if you’re bothering to knock.”

And to that, she had to acquiesce—but not before she heaved out a longsuffering sigh.

“I never thought I’d have to compete with my boss for a man’s attention.” Idly, she picked through Sam’s collection of alcohol before she selected a bottle of her favorite whiskey—Sam had bought it for her, just for the kind of nights she’d mentioned. “You really are something, aren’t you?”

It wasn’t meant to be a compliment, but Sam chose to take it like one anyway—just to spite her—and she met the thin-lipped grin he sent her way by insolently cracking open the bottle and pouring herself a large glass despite the hour.

It was a comfortable partnership. Maybe impressively so considering their less-than-conventional personalities—Charlie had muttered something about _unstoppable force_ and _immovable object_ once—but they’d made it work well enough.

Probably even a little better than _well enough_ on the occasional night she ended up at his door, but that was a dead-end road as far as Ruby seemed concerned.

“What does Lucifer want?” Sam asked, checking his pistol even though his mind was elsewhere—he’d been paying close attention the news, of course, but nothing had struck him as particularly up their alley as of the late. No mysterious disappearances of notable figures, no grievances against the East Enders any worse than usual… it’d been quiet on all fronts, really. “Is it something exciting?”

Ruby leaned back, lips curling up into a smirk— _yes,_ she was taunting him, _but I’m not going to tell you._ And predictably, all she said was,

“If I told you, it’d ruin the surprise, wouldn’t it?”

A _surprise_ from Ruby’s vocabulary could constitute a wide variety of things, so just to be safe, Sam tucked an extra clip of ammo into the inner pocket of his coat before he headed towards the door.

“Is he at the usual place?”

“Mhm—better hurry. I stopped for coffee on the way over here.”

Sam scoffed, but no real irritation made it onto his face—his mind was elsewhere, already daydreaming about what he’d be doing an hour from now. He called something standard over his shoulder— _lock the door when you leave, I’ll see you later—_ and then he was on his way to Lucifer’s, ready to break the monotony of routine.

Lucifer had his back to the open door when Sam arrived. He was bent over his table—the _planning_ table, Sam noticed—too focused to give Sam anything more than a cursory glance over his shoulder when he politely rapped on the doorframe to draw his attention.

It was as good of an invitation as Lucifer ever gave when he was occupied, so Sam just stepped further into the room and joined his side, casting his gaze down onto the table’s contents.

A sprawling blue map had been spread over it, picked and slashed over with dozens of white lines, fancy shapes. Vaguely, Sam could just recall seeing something similar from a class he’d taken in college—a blueprint, if he remembered right. A closer look revealed that the lines were a little shaky, not like the machine-perfect print fine details required—so it a hand-copied blueprint, then?

Well, _that_ was certainly suggestive—almost as much as Lucifer’s spidery cursive, the personal notes he’d scrawled in the margins— _point of entry, detonation, fire hazard._

“What’s this belong to?” Sam asked, but even as he studied it, the answer was becoming clear.

Rows of machinery had been written into the plans, furnaces grafted to power the cogs and gears that spun the whole place around—whatever it was, it had all the makings of factory.

Lucifer—remarkably, astonishingly—actually looked up, and that in itself was enough to clue Sam into the idea that whatever this was, it was something worthwhile. After all, he could count the number of times in eight years that Lucifer had looked up from work on a hand.

“You’re familiar with _Alighieri Steamworks_?”

Like many of Lucifer’s questions, it was  rhetorical.

Everyone knew _Alighieri Steamworks,_ and Sam… well, he suspected he knew them best of all.

His nightmares from the night before came crawling back up his throats— _the march of machines, the shouts of faceless shoulders, Dean’s face white with terror—_ and Sam drove his nails into his palm until blood welled up from the stinging half-crescents they’d created.

“Yes,” Sam dazedly answered, refusing to let his earlier dreams resurface. “I’m familiar with them.”

Lucifer must’ve seen straight through his act, because his eyes softened just a fraction. He said nothing, of course. If there was anything Sam hated more than politics, it was pity.

“Well, it so happens that I’ve stumbled upon some interesting intelligence regarding their next business venture,” Lucifer began, and Sam didn’t miss the sideways look that was sent his way. “I don’t imagine you’ll be any fonder of it than I was.”

“No,” Sam answered, only half-distant now. A low whistle of anger was starting to gain strength within him, barreling over everything in its path, simmering and simmering until it threatened to overflow, and Sam vaguely thought might’ve been more rousing if it wasn’t for the underbelly of fear beneath it. “But I wasn’t exactly fond of them to begin with.”

Lucifer made a noise of agreeance, then produced a neatly folded square from his pocket and handed it to Sam. Carefully, he unfolded it and looked up.

“Another blueprint?” Sam asked, brows furrowed.

“Take a look.”

Sam did, and, instantly, instinctively, his throat tightened in a panic—an old reaction, a visceral thing he’d drilled into himself years and years ago. He got over it quickly, of course— _it’s just a drawing, it can’t hurt you, get over yourself—_ and looked it over.

It was a mech—not surprising, given that such machines were _Alighieri Steamwork’s_ specialty, their top-of-the-line product, the call to fame that made them all too well-known to even the far-off locals of the _G’ehenna_ borderlands _._ After all, _Alighieri Steamworks_ was the sole supplier of mechs to very military that’d gone to war there.

“It’s a mech,” Sam dully said, his chest growing tight. “One of the _Elysian_ army models.”

“Yes. I was hoping you’d be capable of gathering that,” Lucifer answered with half-indulgent sarcasm.

Sam ducked his head— _of course that’s not what he was wanted to hear; a five-year old could’ve figured that out—_ and swallowed down timeworn fear, forced him to take a better look.

It was a mech, same as the ones that’d loomed over his hometown, but at the same time, it wasn’t. The scale was all wrong— _those_ mechs had loomed nearly ten meters tall, needed a five-man team to run. These weren’t even half that height, seemed design for a three-man team—two men to shovel coal into the boilers and a third to pilot the machine.

This wasn’t a mech like any Sam had ever seen or even one that existed—this was only a _prototype_ of one, and that made it all that much more concerning.

“It’s miniaturized,” Sam realized, glancing up—and _that_ was what Lucifer had been looking for, because his face went grim-set and he merely nodded. And a new prototype of mech, a miniaturized one, would only fall into their domain if… Sam straightened up, bit back the wave of nausea that threatened to crash over him. “It’s shrunken down to fit in the streets of _Eden.”_

Lucifer gently pried the blueprint back from Sam’s tightly clenched hands, then turned back to the larger blueprint. It wasn’t supposed to be a blueprint—it was a _map_ , Sam abruptly realized.

“I’m sure I don’t need to explain why having mechs running around the city would be counterproductive to our goals,” Lucifer said, dropping a slender finger onto the map. “This is an _Alighieri Steamworks_ factory currently in construction down by the river. Its opening just happens to coincide with the estimated start date of the production of the miniaturized mechs.”

He looked expectantly over at Sam, seeing if he’d made the connection—he had.

“So,” Sam finally began, hoping his voice didn’t betray everything going on behind the purposefully blank face he was putting on, “We stop them.”

Seeing machines of _Alighieri Steamworks_ make march down the streets was a chapter of Sam’s life he’d thought he’d left behind. It was also one he didn’t want to reopen—just like every other part of his life that’d taken place in his hometown.

“Yes.”

Sam was silent, and, gracefully, Lucifer took a step back from the table and moved over to his liqueur shelf, hand hovering thoughtfully over a few bottles before he finally selected one. He retrieved them a set of tumblers, then returned to Sam’s side and poured them both a hearty serving.

Another time, Sam might have refused. He had his fair share of reasons, after all—it was still obscenely early in the morning, he hadn’t yet eaten anything that day, and even if no such distinctions officially existed within _Morningstar,_ Lucifer was still effectively his superior officer—but, well, today was proving to be quite the rough morning. And Lucifer _had_ offered.

So, Sam accepted, took a sip of whatever Lucifer had poured him, and tried not to show his surprise when the bitter tang of _G’ehenna-_ brewed beer hit his tongue.

“I know you have personal motivation to see to it that _Alighieri Steamworks_ mechs don’t ever make it onto the streets,” Lucifer started, pausing to give Sam a careful look, “So I’d like you on the field team. I know you’ll be able to see the destruction of their factory through.”

Sam looked down into his glass.

For years, he’d been craving another _G’ehenna_ beer, and now that he had one in his hand, he never wanted to taste one again. It reminded him too much of home. Of Dean.

Sam set it down and retreated into his thoughts, shoving memories away.

Lucifer was right, of course, just as he always was—Sam would stay even if bullets were flying, tear the factory down brick by brick with a sledgehammer if he had to.

It made Sam wonder a little if he was losing focus on the mission’s objective—the _real_ one, to make sure that there were no mechs patrolling the East End, impeding all of _Morningstar’s_ less-than-legal efforts—but, well, he had good reason to be a little affected this time.

“When do I go?” Sam asked, a drumbeat call to arms echoing in his head.

“Tonight—Ruby knows the rest. I trust that you’ll be able to find her?”

“It won’t be a problem,” Sam promised—she’d still be at his flat, cadging drinks.

Lucifer held his eyes just a moment longer, considering him carefully. And then the veneer of aloofness broke for just a moment, shattered by a cool smile.

“Then I trust you’ll bring me good news the next time I see you.”

Before the words even rolled off his tongue, before they were even a coherent thought in his mind, Sam knew he would. The dirigible—he’d had a stake in that. A different one, admittedly, but still a stake. He’d seen the conditions in which welders worked, seen how the manufacture of machinery resulted in children with crushed hands and men and women with missing limbs.

But this? This was a stake of a different kind, and it was all the more reason to see it through until the end.

  

* * *

 

 

Around him, the factory was silent— _lifeless, the quiet hung like fog._

Sam tried to remind himself it wasn’t like the mines, where silence meant that something had gone terribly wrong, that death was lurking close— _that Dean was lying a hundred different places in a mine that never should’ve been there, that wouldn’t have been if it weren’t for Elysia, that the dynamite in his hand—_ Sam bit his tongue until it bled and forced himself to focus.

Charlie’s words from earlier that afternoon replayed clearly in Sam’s head—a blessing, really, because Sam didn’t intend to end the night on the wrong end of a explosion stronger than a dozen sticks of dynamite— _maybe more,_ Charlie’s voice sounded in his head.

Sam didn’t like explosives. He‘d known that they’d need them, of course, that there’d be no other way to bring a factory to the floor without the power of a hell of a lot of dynamite, but he’d chosen not think about it until Ruby had brought him to Charlie, until she’d showed him what to do.

And even then, it hadn’t really sunk in until now—but he forced his hands not to stay steady.

_Flip off the safety, blue crosses with green, yellow goes with orange, then cut red and unscrew the cap. Make sure the detonator is responsive, then get the hell out._

Sam glanced up, checking up with Ruby. She was still stationed neatly in the doorway, gun drawn, head craned around the corner to check for any night guards they might not have known about.

“How’s it coming, Sam?” she asked him once she caught his stare.

“Almost done,” he promised.

The red wire split clean in half, and Sam carefully remembered what came next.

_Unscrew the cap, check the detonator, get the hell out._

Sam pulled out the mechanical box from his pocket, spending a few precious seconds making sure it was on and synced with the charge before he stood.

“Good?” Sam threw a nod in her direction, and Ruby looked behind him, eyeing the explosive he’d set up. “Charlie’s _sure_ that’s gonna bring down the whole place? I mean, it’s not exactly the most impressive bomb I’ve ever seen. I know size isn’t _everything,_ but...”

Part of Sam was inclined to agree—the bomb was hardly even fifteen pounds, concealable under a bulky coat—but the other half of his head cycled back to all the things Charlie had made before—most notably, the invention that’d gotten him off the deck of a particular dirigible.

“It’ll be fine,” he brushed Ruby off, rising to his feet.

“I still think we should just should’ve stuck to planting dynamite,” she dryly suggested, “Just to be safe.”

“Yeah, and how would we have set that off?”

“I was thinking _you’d_ set it off while I stood away at a safe distance.”

Sam snorted, joining her at the doorway and sent one last look over his shoulder. The bowels of the factory stared back, newly-built machinery ready to breathe life into the building.

Machinery that’d create the very same mechs that Sam had spent his childhood cringing away from, that’d belonged to the empire that’d killed his family, razed all of _G’ehenna_ during the war and claimed to have rescued them from _Avernus_ once the blood had dried.

Sam wasn’t _Avernian,_ wasn’t _Elysian,_ and he wasn’t a helpless seven-year old anymore either.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he said, old wounds winding their way up his throat. He wasn’t seven years old any longer, but that didn’t mean he liked explosives any more than he did as a kid.

Ruby didn’t have to be told twice, and Sam wasn’t far behind. The factory was a maze, but they’d studied Lucifer’s map extensively that afternoon, and within a minute, they were slipping quietly out into the night. It wasn’t quite dark—the fog kept the light trapped down low—but it was just dim enough to stay obscured by shadow if they moved carefully.

Lithely, they twisted and winded through the dark yard, careful to avoid the sections that were better lit by the yellowish glow spilling from nearby streetlamps. It was a lengthy trek in the dark, but they managed without attracting any attention. It _did_ help that this particular portion of the manufacturing district tended not to run so late at night, unlike a few of the other places.

Finally, they reached the gate that led to the city beyond. Sam motioned for Ruby to stop and pulled the detonator from his pocket. Preemptively, he held his breath, gritted his teeth, and then detonated the bomb.

Or _tried_ to, at any rate.

Because instead of the earth-shaking explosion he’d been expecting, the only sound he heard was aggravated series of beeps from the controller in his hand.

“That’s not good,” Ruby wryly commented, peering over his shoulder down at the device.

Sam muttered a curse, trying to detonate it a second time just to make sure he hadn’t done something wrong the first time around. He was met with the same result.

“What’s it trying to tell you?” Ruby asked, pointing at the tiny yellow bulb at the top of the detonator. It was flashing insistently in a clear pattern that Sam didn’t recognize.

He thought it might be Morse code for a moment, but the flashes were too irregular to be any kind of code. Something Charlie had told him about, then?

Sam strained his memory—range. She’d said something about range, right?

_“I haven’t had a chance to test the range, so be sure to tell me how far it’ll pick up a signal.”_

He looked back up, trying to judge the distance back to the factory. Two, three hundred yards? Plus whatever insulation was inside of the walls, then maybe another thirty feet to the center of the room… And then they’d been almost underground, so that was yet something else in the way.

“I think I’m too far away,” Sam told her, clutching the device tighter in his hand— _don’t go back, don’t go back near it, don’t—_ and he gritted his jaw, shoving the thoughts away. “I’ll double back—you head out. No reason for both of us to risk getting caught in the blast.”

Ruby gave him a _look,_ but obliged, climbing nimbly over the iron gate and out into the streets beyond. Sam tucked the detonator back into his pocket with an adrenaline-wrought hand, looking back towards the factory. The very volatile, very-rigged-to-blow factory, almost certainly full cellar to ceiling with explosive materials and toxic matter.

_You’ll be fine. This is different._

Sam slunk along the edges of the gate, ten, fifteen, twenty yards closer. The detonator still beeped miserably when he tried to set it off, then again with another fifteen yards.

He spared a look over his shoulder—it wouldn’t be long before this end of the city started to open up for the day, before construction crews would come to put on the finishing touches.

Sam moved a little faster towards the building, this time inching forwards fifty feet. But even by the time he’d cut his distance to the factory in half, the bomb still refused to detonate. Sam’s jaw tightened, adrenaline intertwining with urgency.

Sam was focused solely on the building, eyes never straying, so focused he didn’t even notice the cops marching down the street until they were nearly even with him. Sam froze—they were maybe a dozen yards away, and there were two of them—no, three.

Fuck.

_Wouldn’t it have been nice to know there was a patrol coming through?_

Quickly, Sam weighed his options. If he moved, there was a good chance the movement would catch their eyes, but if he stayed still, he was just as screwed once they got closer— _and shit._

Sam _knew_ she wouldn’t have left, not until the damn place went up.

“Help!” Ruby cried, darting down the street, stumbling dramatically over the uneven cobblestones—and damn if Sam wasn’t thankful to have her along on this one.

Instantly, the brigade’s attention diverted to her— _fuck_ , Sam owed her for that save.

Still, even with her running interference, he needed to move. The second she got close enough, they’d see she was wearing a man’s clothes, know something was off even if didn't have her pistol pulled already—she was buying him a little time, but not nearly enough for him to keep going at the same pace.

But Sam could salvage this. He _would._

He just had to move a lot quicker, give up on some semblance of caution.

Diagonally, Sam cut across the cobblestones, sprinting half-towards the factory and half-towards the other end of the yard, trusting that Ruby would keep the cops distracted enough for them not to notice him—at least until it was too late. He’d make his escape downstream if he had to, but he’d be damned if he left before that fucking bomb went off.

Sam’s feet struck the ground hard, thumb agitatedly _clickclickclicking_ the detonator with every step, only to be met by a dull clack and no explosion every time.

 _“Hey!”_ a voice cried out from well-behind him.

Halfway to the opposite end of the yard, he finally spared a look backwards just in time to see Ruby crest the top of the fence, dropping lithely down onto the cobblestones and breaking into a sprint after him. Behind her, the constables were racing towards the fence—they were too far behind now. Sam had the head start, had the speed. He could make it.

He’d just turned around, let his thumb come down on the detonator when all around him, the world burst, the suddenness of it all taking him by surprise.

The shockwave threw him clean off his feet, in a ten-foot arc before he came to the ground again, landing awkwardly on his wrist—spraining it at the very least.

 _“Fuck,”_ Sam thought he cursed, but his hearing was gone, filled with nothing but an insistent ringing.

He curled up on the ground, trying to shield himself from falling glass and chunks of concrete and twisted bits of rebar. Debris pelted the ground around him, a few pieces tearing up his back with a sharp one-two sting, but Sam hardly noticed.

He was deaf, dizzy, blinded by the flash—like he’d looked down the barrel of a gun and fired.

Disoriented, he tried to crawl onto his knees with limited success. Random pieces of debris were still falling razor-sharp from the sky, but his mind was still crying at him to run. Fuck subtlety—all of _Eden_ had heard that, dead of night or not.

_Get moving._

Sam nearly made it onto his feet before he fell back down, clean onto his hurt wrist. Pain echoed all the way up his arm in a rush of white-hot heat, and his front dropped flush with the ground as his wrist gave way under the pressure. He snarled a curse.

_Get up._

Sam forced himself to lift his head, but the world was still spinning.

_C’mon, get the hell up._

This time, he made it halfway off his feet before someone tugged him the rest of the way up, slinging his arm over their shoulder and breaking off into a hobble-run towards the river.

Sam’s first instinct was to break away, but it burned out quickly when he saw who it was.

“Thanks for the assist,” he told Ruby, and even though he couldn’t hear it himself through the ring in his ears, he must’ve made _some_ sound, because she turned to him, irritated.

She said something back, but Sam couldn’t quite back out what. It did, however, involve irritation and a roll of her eyes. That was fine—he could ask later.

Together, they—or mostly Ruby, if Sam was being honest—made it to the far end of the yard. He leaned heavily against it as Ruby nimbly scaled to the top, reaching down to offer him a hand. Gratefully, he accepted, scrambling clumsily from the top, hardly able to keep his grip. It was even more of a challenge to keep his footing as they fell onto the other side onto the slick mud of the riverbank but again, Ruby steadied him with a hand on his arm.

“Still breathing?” Ruby asked, and Sam heard her this time. It was like he was listening underwater through earfuls of cotton, but barely was better—good enough, as far as he was concerned.

Sam glanced over his shoulder. Already, the constables were sprinting to the front gate, five hundred meters away. It was locked still—Sam had made sure of that when they’d broken in, figuring it’d buy them a minute or two of time, but if they decided to shoot through it, well…

For now, he was just thankful none of them had decided to try braving the fence.

“Still breathing,” Sam coughed back, starting to drag his feet forwards, “Prefer to keep it that way, too.”

Sliding, stumbling, and sticking in the sludgy mud of the riverbank, they made their getaway and lost themselves among the waking city.

  

* * *

 

 

Lucifer took one look at Sam as he stumbled into the room and sent his pageboy off to fetch a doctor before guiding him down into an armchair. Sam shot him a weak smile of thanks, head falling back against the plush cushions. He let his eyes close, and, distantly, his wrist throbbed.

Fuck, he hoped it wasn’t broken.

“So,” Lucifer dryly begun, “May I assume things didn’t go as smoothly as planned?”

“Oh, things went fine ‘til the cops showed up. I had to run interference while Sam doubled back to set off the detonator—range wasn’t what we’d thought it’d be.”

Sam knew what look would be on Lucifer’s face. Even with eyes closed, he could see it.

“I wasn’t aware that the police would have a presence in that quarter at this time of night,” Lucifer replied, using the cold voice that Sam had long-since learned generally preceded truly chilling threats and generous amounts of property damage. “I’ll have a heart-to-heart with my informants in the constable’s department and see to it that this doesn’t happen again.”

“It’s fine,” Sam spoke up, hoping to tamp things down a bit. “We handled it alright. And it was just the police—I’ve gotten away from them a dozen times just this past year alone.”

Cool fingers pressed against his jaw, gently turning his head from side to side. The contact made him groan in pain, forced his eyes shut tighter. God, he had the _killer_ of all headaches.

“You’re bleeding from at least half a dozen places,” Lucifer commented, withdrawing his touch. “And you haven’t let go of your wrist since you walked in. Is it broken?”

“I’m fine,” Sam protested, forcing his eyes back open, but even as he said it, his skull throbbed violently.

His head fell back against the cushions, flinching when the movement forced the air from his lungs— _fine, other than bruises and maybe a couple cracked ribs._

“We’ll see if the doctor concurs with your assessment,” Lucifer dryly replied, but they all knew he was just humoring Sam. Even if his injuries were still all relatively minor, Lucifer would almost certainly keep him out of the direct line of fire for at least a couple days just to be safe, and that meant Sam would miss any action between now and then— _damnit._

Sam tried not to scowl. He knew _Morningstar’s_ other recruits could do the same job just fine, but not as well as him—and of course, there was always the possibility it was just pride that’d led him to that conclusion, but it wasn’t as though he was entirely without evidence.

He’d lasted in _G’ehenna_ during the _Elysian_ occupation, through the fighting, through the famines, through all of it. He’d made it—seven years of hell, and he’d made it.

So as far as he was concerned, there was no in the city, no one in _Morningstar_ other than maybe Ruby, maybe Lucifer who had as much of a personal stake in this than him—and there was certainly no one who knew how to fight for this quite like he did, knew _why_ they were fighting.

“I’ve been through worse,” Sam went on, forcing himself to sit a little straighter despite the crick of pain it sent shooting down his neck. “Whiskey would do more than a doctor.”

For the most part, Lucifer ignored him—though he _did_ motion for Ruby to pour him a glass of liquor, which Sam gratefully accepted. Lucifer waved away the glass she offered him.

“At any rate,” Lucifer asked, “Other than that particular setback, how were things?”

“All according to plan. No workers of any sort and no guard—that we ran into, at least—and the foreman’s map was good. Don’t know what you’re paying him, but whatever it is, he deserves a bonus.”

“Noted.”

“And I didn’t get a chance to get a closer look at the scene, but near as I could tell, the whole factory was trashed. It didn’t look like much, but Charlie’s bomb got the job done.”

“Good. I’ll have her get started on…”

A knock at the door cut off the conversation before Lucifer could finish, and Sam forced himself to sit a little more upright in his seat, open his eyes a bit wider. Even if he was still a little out of it, he’d do best to at least _look_ alert if he wanted the doctor to give Lucifer the all-clear.

Lucifer glanced to Ruby, giving her his _we’ll talk more later_ look, then strode over to open the door. Sam tried not to groan as he entered. Unsurprisingly, it _Morningstar’s_ usual medic—a doctor who went by the name Robert, which was almost certainly a fake name given his more than questionable clientele and a fullhearted lack of a valid medical license.

That was something they were willing to overlook, of course—physicians that didn’t ask questions were high in demand and of even shorter in supply in the East End, and, well, Sam would’ve been lying if he claimed that he didn’t need to see one often.

Which wasn’t to say Sam didn’t— _allegedly_ —have a history of trying to hide the extent of his injuries at least when it was a matter of being cleared to work, but that was another matter.

“What would the problem seem to be tonight, Mister Wesson?” Robert asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter without even sparing a second look at Ruby or Lucifer.

“He’s had a bit of an accident _,_ ” Lucifer explained for Sam, “We’ll call it a barfight, hm?”

“Of course,” Robert replied, easily catching on. “No matter, though. I’ll have him patched up in no time.”

Sam cooperated, allowed himself to be checked out without any hint of distorting the truth—well, _mostly._ It probably would’ve been more worrying if he hadn’t, after all.

But for the most part, he’d gotten unscathed—for his definition of unscathed, at any rate. His coat and all the layers he’d had on under it had kept him from getting pelted by the worst of the debris, though there were a couple gashes that still needed a few stitches to close. His wrist had already started to swell something terrible and dark bruising had already gathered around the joint, but the doctor diagnosed it as not broken—probably—which was good enough in Sam’s book.

He _did_ get an order to ice it and keep from anything too strenuous for a few days—if not a week or longer—but no sooner was the doctor out the door than was Sam already planning on how he could skirt around that particular instruction.        

Like he was reading Sam’s mind, Lucifer looked over to him and raised an expectant brow.

“I heard him,” he muttered, leaning back. “Three days.”

“ _If_ you heal as you should,” Lucifer amended Sam. Turning to Ruby, he dismissed her with, “You and I will speak more tomorrow afternoon—in the meantime, you’re free to head home. Sam, you’re welcome to spend the night here if you’re feeling unwell. Otherwise, I’ll call you a carriage.”

“I can walk just fine,” Sam objected, heaving himself up from the armchair. “It’s not my leg.”

Lucifer looked him up and down, studying him carefully before he finally waved him off.

“As you wish.”

Sam swallowed down the rest of his whiskey, accepted his coat back from Lucifer, then headed out the door after Ruby. Out on the street, she pulled out a carton of the thinly-rolled cigars East Enders called _chokers_ and pulled out a stick before tilting the pack to him.

“Smoke?”

Sam was pretty sure just living in _Eden_ was strangling his lungs to death well enough on its own—the air here wasn’t anything like it was in the countryside—so he politely waved her offer off and just chivalrously lit her cigarette instead.

“So— _Alighieri Steamworks,_ knocked down a pag. How’s it feel?” Ruby asked. She lifted her cigar to her mouth and took a long drag, and the red glow of the embers clashed strangely with the washed-out yellow of the streetlamps. “Figure you have a history with those assholes, being from the borderlands.”

Sam turned away, offering a half-shrug. Truth be told, he hadn’t had much time to bask in the victory quite yet. He’d been too worried with the police showing up, then the menace of a broken wrist looming over him, threatening to put him out of commission. Even now, it throbbed violently every few seconds, complimenting the lingering ring in his ears.

“Haven’t had a chance to let in sink in yet,” he said, putting off a real answer. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

Ruby eyed him a moment longer, tapped the ashes off the end of her cigar, arched a brow.

“What makes you think I’ll see you again so soon?”

Sam’s lips twisted up at the edges, his mind slowly coming to the conclusion that he’d found himself at least unconsciously hoping for the whole time. Lucifer rarely sent two of _Morningstar’s_ most senior members on the same job, after all—too much of a security risk if they were to be caught, captured.

“I get the feeling this wasn’t a one-and-done type deal. This was, what? The trial run?”

Ruby considered her cigar a moment and tapped the ashes off the end, but her lips were slowly curling into a smirk. Briefly, she looked up and gave him an insolent shrug.

“Could be,” she replied, and then she set off into the dark.

Sam watched her just until she turned the corner, mind trying to work through the implications of that, trying to think of what’d come next. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before he realized it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight, at least. Nightmares had cut his sleep short the night before, and he’d been on his feet twenty hours today already. Any kind of reason was out of the question until he got more than a couple of hours of rest.

Sam turned, already half-regretful he hadn’t taken Lucifer’s offer to call him up a carriage for the way home—but he’d still be damned before he admitted it, so he pushed onwards.

Sam would half-regret not taking up Lucifer’s offer for a carriage halfway home, but he’d be damned before he admitted it, so he pushed the rest of the way home—and upon arriving, passed out almost the second his head hit his pillow.

And that night, his dreams of _Elysian_ mechs marching into his home ended a little differently.

 

* * *

 

                              

Sam’s suspicions turned out to be right, because no sooner had he left Ellen’s bar the next day than was Ruby joining his side, replying to his smirk with a roll of her eyes.

“Lucky guess,” she wrote him off, and together they were off to Lucifer’s hideout once more.

They were late to the party, as it turned out. Some of the guests were still shrugging off coats and making themselves comfortable, though, so Sam figured they couldn’t be _that_ late.

As he stripped off his outer coat, Sam scanned the room.

There was Ruby, of course, and Lilith—who was a little more of a surprise, given that Sam only saw her in person a few times a year. It wasn’t too much of one, of course—from what Sam understood, she’d done nearly as much to found _Morningstar_ as Lucifer. Meg, who’d situated herself in a corner, caught his eye and greeted him with a wry smile, which Sam returned—while not quite friends, they were at least friendly, having been in the line of fire together more than a few times.

Sam noticed Azazel last and looked away just as fast. For whatever reason, Azazel had decided that he liked Sam, a little to his chagrin. Sam, on the other hand, wanted to stay as far as humanly possible from him. There was nothing to really back up his aversion, really. Azazel had served under _Elysia_ during the war, yes, but that wasn’t a guarantee that he was one and the same as the soldiers that’d plagued Sam’s town—but still. Old biases died hard.

All in all, they made quite the motley looking group. Men and women, of a wide range of ages, all of differing nationalities and backgrounds—all of which were dubious, granted—and nothing like any group of politicians in Parliament or businessmen or lawmakers. They had their blind spots, admittedly, and still they were a dozen times more diverse than any other power-holding force in _Elysia._

Not more so than those in _Avernia,_ of course, but that was another matter.

“Everyone’s here,” Lucifer announced, voice cutting clearly over the quiet conversations being held in the room. Everyone’s eyes went to him, watching as he strode to the center of the room and settled in front of his round table. “I assume everyone knows why I’ve gathered you here?”

A chorus of _yeses_ and nodding heads infused through the room—not that Lucifer had bothered to check. He was entirely focused on the list in front of him, fingers tapping thoughtfully against the mahogany of his desk.

“I’ve arranged a series of attacks on the empire’s various industries. There are obvious benefits of halting industries that’d be detrimental to our goals, but I’m more concerned with the long-term goals at the moment. I’m sure you all understand basic economics, that the disruption of the supply chain will create a scarcity of certain products.”

Lucifer paused, leaning back and scanning the room to see if his words were sinking in.

“And if, say, a monopoly were to be created within certain trades, well, it’d leave the owners of said industries in an optimal position to bargain, hm?” Lucifer glanced up, meeting Azazel’s eyes. “Azazel and I will be responsible for the creation of these shells companies within the next few months. Ruby will be left to do the fundraising that’ll be needed for this endeavor. I’ve already briefed her on the specifics, but if she needs your assistance for any related task, treat her request as you would one from me.”

Lucifer’s eyes slid across the room to Sam’s, and Sam was long since past cringing under the full intensity of his stare, of course, but—well, it was only natural to _want_ to. The urge passed quickly, though, gone the second Lucifer’s gaze relaxed just a little.

“Sam, I’m assigning you to the short-term side of all of this while the rest of us take the long approach. I’ve compiled a list of targets for you to look over. In light of your recent successes, everything else—including who you take along with you and the order in which you choose to take factories down—will be left up to your discretion.”

A swell of pride rose up in Sam’s chest, though he was careful not to let it show. Lucifer would be caught dead before he ever showed anything but indifference or anger—perhaps even a hint of smugness or pride if the situation called for it—and most of _Morningstar_ seemed keen on following in his footsteps, Sam included.

But _this_ was what Sam had spent the past eight years working towards. It’d taken him four years of running errands and completing menial tasks just to work his way into a room with Lucifer’s senior staff, then another few before he’d ever been consulted—and now, _now_ he had room to maneuver, to make the choices that’d help the people under _Elysia’s_ boot.

And after all he’d seen, all _Elysia_ had put him through, that was all he wanted. It was all too broken for him—for _anyone—_ to try to fix it from within, and so he’d build something better.

 _Morningstar_ would build something better. It was what Lucifer had promised him all those years ago, what had helped Sam sleep every time he woke up from nightmares—of his house in flames, of his dad at the wrong end of an _Elysian_ gun, of Dean dead in the mines _Elysian_ had carved out of his homelands once the war had ended.

Sam would help build something better.

Something that’d make sure its people didn’t die in accidents that could so easily be prevented with basic safety standards, that’d do better things with its coffers than piss away its money on petty luxuries, something that wouldn’t burn entire towns under its banner—war or not.

And here he was, doing just that.             

Sam hid his smile beneath the rim of a tumbler, just sipped at his brandy.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops! i am a blatant liar! sorry about that whole "new chapter in 2-3 days" spiel! at any rate, this was originally one chapter which ended up being split into two, so it's at least mostly written aha. tentative date for that one coming out is this weekend. anyways--thanks for reading! kudos and comments feed a starving artist :)


	4. The Editorial

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so it's been like two fucking years. oops.
> 
> anyways! the road so far:  
> -gabriel is just a fucking bitch honestly  
> -sam is thriving in his post as professional anarchist aside and just got a sick ass promotion to blow up whatever the fuck he wants

  **The Editorial**

 

Sam had looked at the list the second he made it out the door, cataloging each name—he knew of that meat packaging plant from the news clippings lining his room, another linen factory from eavesdropped East End gossip, a steelworks plant from pilfered charity ward admittance records. Almost all the listed factories were names he’d expected, all places he’d someday been planning to bring to Lucifer’s attention—hell, as he went on, he realized that some he already _had._

But before he could bask in the realization for long, his arm was pushed down.

His eyes tore themselves off from the paper up towards Ruby, quickly taking note of the coy smile flitting onto her lips, the easy posture she’d adopted.

She looked almost smug as she arched her brows, self-satisfied, certainly not at all surprised—and, suddenly, the pieces clicked together.

“The airship,” Sam said, “It was a test run, wasn’t it?”

“Had to make sure you could handle yourself without anyone to hold your hand.”

“So you knew,” he realized, watching as her lips twisted into a smirk.

“That you were about to get a promotion? ‘Course I did. Lucifer’s had me babysitting you on every big bust you’ve gone on for the past three years." She saw as the pieces clicked into place, tilted her head to the side as her smirk widened. "What, you don’t think I was there just to look pretty, do you?”

Four years of work to get to meet Lucifer’s senior staff, a couple more to finally have someone ask for opinion, and eight in all to get permission to create a command of his own, run his own missions.

“Lucifer likes you, you know,” Ruby went on after a moment, considering him thoughtfully. “You’ve made it a lot further in the ranks than plenty of people who’ve been with him from the start.”

“He likes me?” Sam asked, brow furrowed. He was half-surprised to hear it, had half-convinced himself that _liking_ was something Lucifer reserved only for single malt scotch and perfectly tailored suits. At best, he'd always half-thought that Lucifer appreciated him at best, liked his work ethnic, trusted that Sam could get things done.

The bland look Ruby gave him made him wonder just what he'd missed—but before he could ask, she'd shaken it off, recovered her smirk. Casually, she slinked over to him, dragging her palms from his shoulders until they rested flat against his chest—bold, considering they were in full view of anyone on the street.

“At any rate, since we’re both here, I thought we might celebrate your promotion.”

“Yeah?” Sam asked, allowing himself be distracted from work for once. “You have any ideas how?”

“Plenty,” she purred—and a bottle of wine and one torn shirt later, it was all out of his mind entirely.

 

* * *

 

 

That didn’t last for long, of course.

Sam woke up to his wrist throbbing like it’d ended up on the business end of a hammer, only to realize he was in an otherwise empty bed (which was fine—really).

He took a few painkillers for his wrist, showered, dressed in something he could wear in the nicer end of town for the trip he'd take later that day, then threw himself into his work with renewed vigor—referencing, cross-checking, consulting the foot-high stack of clippings he kept tucked beneath an errant floorboard.

By midday, he had enough groundwork finished to decide to move things along.

“ _In light of your recent successes, everything else—including who you take along with you…”_

Sam already had someone in mind.

Thankfully, meeting them involved leaving his apartment because all he’d had to eat that day was leftover coffee from the morning prior.

(As usual, his pantry was empty—well, empty _if_ you didn’t count the stale heel of bread and something only vaguely identifiable as fruit (once) as valid food items).

Sam’s spine popped as he stood from his desk, limbs creaking stiffly as he bounded down the stairs of his flat and out into the fresh air. He took a left to head towards _Eden’s_ commerce district, stopped on his way for his first real meal of the day—another coffee, a rye croissant—another half hour walking, and he was there.

In a lot of ways, Charlie was probably Sam’s closest friend.

Of the dozen colleagues he was friendly with, Sam classified only a handful of them as friends.

Ruby was the most obvious choice, of course, but she wasn’t the sort to be relied on if you needed bail. 

(But even with that certain degree of undependability aside, the whole kind-of-but-not dating thing complicated things—though Sam wondered more and more all the time if that was a problem he’d invented all on his own).

And Lucifer—well, he made all of Sam’s other relationships look like they belonged in a schoolyard. Ruby had said that Lucifer liked him, but Sam was—well, it made sense that someone whose career was founded on treason would employ a certain degree of ambiguity in his personal affairs. He  _had_ to be impassive.

And of course everyone outside of _Morningstar—_ Ellen, casual East End acquaintances, his regulars at the bar—couldn’t break into his inner circle. At the end of the day, their lives only overlapped superficially. Sam laid out his society-sanctioned façade for all of them, and, minus a few liberties, gave everyone exactly what was expected of him.

The façade held, people befriended the person Sam was supposed to be—the person he might've been if he hadn't watched his family die, nearly done so himself half a dozen times before he'd crawled out of  _G'ehenna—_ and the person he was looked out at them from behind a window, painted on a smile that never meant a thing for them.

Charlie got the ones he actually meant.

Sam looked down.

His watch ticked to half past one. Nearby, the clock tower’s bells sounded once to mark the time. It was uncharacteristically louder than Sam was used to when he was this close to Parliament, the shrieking bells clanging a little like klaxons in the air— _like the funeral bell on a hill—_ he swallowed.

Charlie was late for her lunch break.

Five minutes gave way to ten, and Sam was about to give up at the half hour mark, decide to find her another day when Charlie stalked out of the building, a law book’s worth of documents clutched white-knuckled in her hands. Her gaze was single-minded as she stormed across the yard—wasn't hard to guess why. 

She didn't even notice Sam, not until he reached out to grab her arm as she passed.

Charlie startled, twisted like she was about to backhand him to the ground, but recognition flashed in her eyes before Sam could see if he was right. Her posture relaxed just a little, but her jaw stayed gritted as she furtively glanced around, anger still bright in her eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Charlie asked, the words coming out a little like a hiss. Sam followed her gaze like he hadn’t checked the yard earlier—there were still only a few other people around, administrative workers taking lunch breaks, mangers congregating to have a smoke. No one had given them anything more than a cursory glance, but Charlie’s look was nothing if not pointed. “I’m _working.”_

“Our boss would want you to hear this,” Sam deliberately replied, tilting his head towards a more secluded corner of the courtyard. “It’s related to yesterday’s business deal.”

Charlie couldn’t help but to perk up at that. Sam hadn’t seen her since the explosion last night, knew that she’d be too interested in knowing how things had gone not to follow.

Her mouth worked silently, but she relented after only a second—although she did grumble out,

“It’s supposed to be my lunch break, you know,” first.

Sam decided not to tell her that according to his count, she had exactly eight minutes on the clock left for her break, just let her lead him out of the earshot of the closest person. No sooner were they off on their own than did she whirl around with her face creased, fly into an interrogation.

“What is it? I haven’t had time to check the paper, but I heard the explosion last night—hold on, that _was_ you, right?” She studied him, trying to force a grin. “I mean, you _look_ like nothing went off in your pocket.”

“It went off without a hitch,” Sam reassured her, pausing when Charlie’s eyes caught onto his injured wrist. It’d swelled and purpled up nicely, too dramatic in its intensity to write off. Sam grimaced, then amended his earlier statement with a casual, “Well, it mostly went off without a hitch—but that’s not what I came to tell you.”

Charlie’s lips twisted up into a dubious grimace but before she could put anything into words, Sam moved on. He pulled out Lucifer’s neatly folded list, tapped it twice, eyes brightening.

“How’d you feel about getting out of an office building for a while?”

Charlie eyed him cautiously a moment, first trying to gauge his meaning, then to test if he was joking. He wasn't—of course he wasn't, wouldn't ever joke about something like this—and as the silence between them wore on, realization filled her. 

“You’re serious?” At Sam’s responding grin, an incredulous laugh burst out from her throat. “Lucifer greenlighted it and everything? Is Ruby already busy?”

“Got a promotion,” Sam said by way of an explanation, unable to hold back his pride any longer. “I’ve officially been given creative liberties.”

“To do what?” Charlie eagerly questioned, already grabbing the list from Sam’s hand to scan it over. Only a second later, she looked back up with wide eyes. “Wait—this isn’t what I think it is, is it?”

”Well, you _made_ our cache. Seems only fair you get to see them in action.”

Charlie glanced down at the paperwork in her hands, then back up at Sam like he’d just handed her the keys to _Eden’s_ bank vault—which made sense, really.

Sam’s own _Morningstar_ internship had mostly been spent writing correspondence, delivering letters, translating documents into and out of _G’ehennan,_ all mixed in with the occasional undercover stint as a stable boy or something of the like—nothing like the adrenaline-rush work he got now.

As a woman, the work Charlie could do—or was _allowed_ to do beneath Eden’s moral standards, rather—was entirely different, useful in an entirely different way. She had free rein to create and build whatever she wanted in her free time, unrestricted access to _Morningstar’s_ storehouses and supplies, but Lucifer had kept her bouncing from job to job in the meanwhile. One month he had her as a secretary, the next a charwoman, then as whatever else brought her close to the things of interest—to bank statements stashed in secret office safes, to steamy letters hidden in secret drawers. To the good stuff, the stuff they could use as blackmail, to find new sponsors for their activities.

It was interesting stuff—more interesting than most of the stuff Sam had done, at least—but three years was a long time to spend hunting intel, a long time to get treated like as the subordinate to some suited prick. Sam would've been itching to blow one of their playgrounds up for a long time in her shoes.

“So?” he asked, feigning as if he didn’t already know exactly what she’d say.

She looked up from the list, still grinning.

“When do we start?”

 

* * *

 

  

Sam waited three days, just as Lucifer had ordered.

Exactly three—and even though his wrist still hurt like a bitch, was still concerning shades of blues and purples and was still swollen and stiff, he’d gone to Lucifer, presented himself as fit for duty.

Lucifer gave him a truly withering look, one that made Sam _pray_ he didn’t actually end up hurting himself any worse because the scolding he’d get if he did—well, what mattered was that Lucifer had agreed to clear him, listened to the plan he’d made with Charlie, given it his seal of approval.

And two in the morning of the next day saw Sam drinking with Charlie near their target in the heart of _Hunter’s Point._ Or pretending to drink, at least. They’d both probably puke the stuff in their glasses back up before it ever made it past their throats—a theory the rest of the bar’s actual clientele supported, given the distinct scent of vomit in the air.

They'd settled on a match factory—something almost impersonal after  _Alighieri Steamworks,_ something Sam almost might not have thought twice about if he hadn't seen so many women and children die of phossy-jaw back in  _G'ehenna_ , die of starvation with their skin glowing in the dark, jawbone rotting away like—well, maybe it was a little personal, but Sam had seen too much in his life for most things not to be.

So they were going to destroy a match factory in the middle of the East End.

Charlie, to her credit, was blending in well for someone raised on the far end of town.

With deliberately ill-fitted clothes and her hacked-short hair tucked beneath a low-slung cap, she was just as indistinguishable as anyone else around them. If Sam looked closely, he could see she was too clean, too well-kept—no dirt under her nails, no bloodshot blue-ringed eyes—but at a glance, she looked just like every other East Ender on this side of town. And certainly not like a woman—good in this particular situation, given that the two of them never would’ve been let into the bar otherwise.

“Where’d you get those?” Sam curiously asked with a motion to her ensemble.

“Charity bin.” She was half-distracted as she peered into her drink, disgust mixing with fascination on her face. Curiously, she lifted her glass and sluiced it around. Sam pretended not to notice how the motion left disturbingly viscous streaks of fluid oozing down the insides of the glass. “Huh,” Charlie muttered, “Well, that’s not something you see every day.”

“Maybe not in the West End,” Sam replied, deftly reaching across the bar to pluck the glass from her grasp—the people who drank in places like these never checked their alcohol, just slammed it back. “But that’s how they do it here.”

“And in _G’ehenna?”_

“In my experience, we prefer to keep our turpentine and alcohol separate.”

“Huh. Shame.”

“Only if you like alcohol poisoning.” Sam pushed their tumblers back towards the other end of the bar, mouth curling into a dry smile. “Or regular poisoning.”

Deciding that it was late enough for most of the traffic to have cleared out of the street near their factory—and that he couldn’t take much more of the stench of stale vomit while he was still sober—Sam stood.

Charlie followed suit, rolled her shoulders, tugged at her shirt to loosen the fit around her waist. Likewise, Sam swept a hand over the back of his neck, tucked in a few errant strands of his too-long hair back under his cap, adjusted his coat so the bulk of the explosives was well-concealed—and no sooner were they ready to go than were they out the side door.

“Have you ever been to this part of the East End before?” Sam asked, catching the morbid fascination on her face as she studied their surroundings.

“Just to see how the West End gossip stacked up to reality,” Charlie answered, raising her brows as she sidestepped a puddle of vomit. “Considering most of them come from people who haven’t ever been here, they were surprisingly on the mark.”

“ _You’re_ a West Ender.”

Charlie paused, understanding starting to dawn on her.

“You all come down here all the time to slum it and people watch or whatever,” Sam dryly told her, only scanning the street for a moment before he found what he was looking for. He nudged her attention towards a skittish-looking man a little further down the opposite side of the street, watching her as she studied the stranger and slowly latched onto the telltale giveaways—the conspicuous lack of patches on his clothes, the clack of his too-polished shoes against the uneven cobblestones, the way his shiny silver watch glinted in the dull yellow glow of the gaslights. Sam’s lips pulled up into a smirk as his eyes flicked over to meet hers. “And then when you get mugged because your idea of dressing cheaply still includes stockings and pocket squares, you come home with a new rumor to add to the mill.”

Her eyes swept the man over one last time before she petulantly told him,

“ _I_ didn’t get mugged.”

Sam replied with a noise that really meant nothing at all, letting the conversation die before bad memories could swirl back up from the back of his mind.

It was only a moment later that he realized his hand had already unconsciously trailed up to his neck, to the silvery white spanning the stretch of his neck. Abruptly, he jerked his hand back down, put it out of mind.

Still, casually as he could without drawing her suspicion, Sam skirted around Charlie and positioned himself to her right, neatly between her and the crumbling brick walls cut into by yawning alleys. The rabbit’s warren of passageways made for good ambushes—this way, he’d be the first one they’d go for. He'd be readier for it.

As it turned out, he didn't need to have worried. They made it to the looming complex of buildings that made up _Himil Munitions_ without incident—and in good time, too.

“You got the gate?” Sam murmured, twisting to lean against the fence to give himself a good view of the traffic on the street—it was sparse this time of night, almost all of it drunken.

Charlie moved in to give the lock a closer look. Sam lit a cigarette—one of Ruby’s _chokers,_ left behind from the other night—and puffed on it to look as though he had a reason to be loitering against the wall, drawing attention away from Charlie as she worked.

“Almost,” Charlie muttered after a minute of working, followed shortly thereafter by a musical _click._ She looked up, met his eyes with a grin. “We’re in business.”

Together, they ducked into the complex. It was eerily quiet without workers to liven up the yard, leaving the buildings to loom menacingly in the sickly yellow light. Sam clearly remembered the blueprints he’d pored over for hours earlier, steered them towards a smaller building on the perimeter of the complex. The gas main was located beneath this one—and as a bonus, the boiler room was located in the basement.

He and Charlie had divvied up the explosives the day before, portioned them into different sizes with the largest chunk saved for this particular building. If all went well, hopefully nothing would be left of it would be a plume of smoke and pulverized brick.

“Would you like to do the honors?” Sam asked, pulling out their biggest parcel of explosives.

Charlie took it from him with a grin, and then they were inside, winding their way past rows of machines and down flights of stairs into the bowels of the building. Finding a spot by the boiler proved to be easy and in under two minutes—twice as fast as Sam had been able to prime the last one—Charlie had the entire thing set up, detonator in hand.

Sam was more than willing to keep watch and let her handle the actual setting up after that. Three more buildings came just as easily as the first and within ten minutes, they’d gotten the rest of the complex wired up, ready to be reduced to rubble.

“You’re sure about the modifications you made to the detonator?” Sam questioned as they slipped out of the last building, unconsciously rubbing his wrist.

“Well, I haven’t tested them yet—but it _should_ increase the range,” Charlie reluctantly admitted, which wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring—but she had kept Sam from taking a death plummet into the ocean when he’d leapt off the airship, so he was going to give her the benefit of the doubt.

They fell into silence as they lithely navigated through the rear of the facilities, out and over the back gate fencing the place off from the truly shifty street beyond. Sam paused until Charlie dropped to the ground beside him, then tilted his head towards the detonator still clutched in her hand.

“Want to do the honors?”

She grinned.

_Click._

Seconds ticked by in silence. Charlie’s face screwed up in frustration. Sam’s expression settled on dread because fuck, he’d have to go back in again, get closer—

The building nearest to them shattered in a plume of broken brick and glass, the explosion echoing through the street like cannonfire—and it was impressive, but it was still only a single building. And with the explosion having alerted every damn man, woman, and child in _Eden,_ there’d be no chance to go back and set off the other ones _—fuck._ Sam almost said as much too, but the frustration and disappointment carved in Charlie’s face might have even been greater than his own.

It was easy to guess why. Lucifer already distrusted her enough as it was on account of her upbringing—building a set of bombs that didn’t detonate wouldn’t do much to elevate her standing in his eyes.

“C’mon, we need to clear out,” Sam said, placing a sympathetic hand on her shoulder

She snapped back to reality, shook her head as if to clear it, then answered.

“Right. Right—this way, isn’t it?”

They made it two steps before the ground under their feet fell out from beneath them.

Sam half-fell, half-dropped flat to the ground, grabbing Charlie with him. No sooner had their stomachs struck the ground than did the whole world shake with a second explosion, this one accompanied by a ball of white-hot blue flame that reached up so far it scraped the sky, so hot Sam felt the back of his neck start to sear— _the building with the gas line._

It was only possible to see after a few seconds of blinding light, but no sooner had Sam tried to stand than did the world shake with a successive _one-two_ punch of explosions, each of them rocking the ground so much that his teeth rattled in his mouth.

“Fuck,” Charlie gasped as order slowly returned to the street around them. “Well, that wasn’t very well-synced.”

Sam was too busy scrambling onto his feet, pulling her up with him, dragging them into the nearest available alley. He cast one look over his shoulder at the smoldering, burning wake they’d left behind, just long enough that a grin caught on his lips, and then they vanished into the East End’s web.

Lucifer was awake—really, sometimes Sam wondered if he ever slept—when they arrived.

“Well, I heard explosions—were they ours?” Lucifer asked, staring straight past Sam to Charlie.

(“ _It’s just the West End thing,”_ Sam would assure her later. _“He has a hard time believing you’d want to leave a fortune behind to slum it with a group of broke insurgents.”_

And just like she always did when this kind of conversation came up, she’d reply,

 _“It was never going to be_ my _fortune.”_ Pause, jaw gritting, eyes narrowing at nothing in particular. “ _It was gonna be my husband’s—God forbid.”)_

But that would be later.

“Yes— _sir_ ,” she nervously answered, quick to tack on the title.

“And why,” Lucifer went on, fingers steepling, “were there four of them?”

Sam almost cut in there, but like he’d already known what Sam was going to do, Lucifer’s finger raised just a fraction, a clear signal for him to stay quiet. Sam shifted on his feet, eyes flicking over to Charlie. It was one of Lucifer’s tests, he knew—a long time ago, he’d been on the receiving end of more than a few—but he knew just as little about what Lucifer wanted to hear now as he did back then.

Charlie looked equally lost about what answer she should give, almost rooted to the spot.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted, resolve steeling as she finished. “But I’ll fix it.”

Lucifer stared her down just long enough that Sam nearly started to fidget, worry that she’d said the wrong thing entirely, but Lucifer finally just leaned back, poured himself a glass of scotch.

“I hope you do,” he coolly answered—and Sam knew one of Lucifer’s dismissals when he heard one, so he nudged her towards the door and that was that.

Charlie came to Sam’s door the next day with a new model of detonator in hand and a grin on her face.

 

* * *

 

A sundry of things happened over the successive weeks.

The most notable was, of course, that Sam’s career was going fantastically. His punch-card for destroyed factories was filling out quite nicely, a new hole added on a nearly-weekly basis.

Similarly, an extra zero had been tacked onto his paycheck that month.

(He’d actually thought it’d been a mistake, gone to Lucifer’s flat—

 _“I think there was a mistake,”_ he’d said.

 Lucifer had given him a bland look, lifted his brows, said,

 _“I’m aware, Sam.”_ Poured two glasses of scotch, handed him one. “ _Consider it a bonus.”)_

Sam still wasn’t sure what to do with so much money. He’d stocked his pantry full of jams and fruits and other foods he usually sacrificed, taken in all his ripped clothes to be mended and washed, bought himself a pair of nice leather shoes that weren’t missing the sole on one foot—and he _still_ had well over half his paycheck left over, lived too frugally to know what to do with it.

Similarly, Charlie’s career seemed to be doing just as well.

She’d fixed the detonators, gotten _Morningstar_ a new sponsor after her latest undercover stint ended with her bringing back a pile of check stubs addressed to half a dozen different mistresses, finally seemed to at least earn Lucifer’s respect if not his trust.

She had good timing too, because also notable was the distinct lack of any of Lucifer’s senior staff.

Sam had only seen Ruby once since his promotion, and that had only been as she’d been leaving Lucifer’s flat. She’d stopped to ask him for a light, and that’d been that. Other than that, he hadn’t even caught so much of a glimpse of anyone else higher than him in rank.

But he had too much on his own plate to give it much thought, so he didn’t.

After all, once the media latched onto things, the game changed.

After their fourth hit, Charlie came by Sam’s door one morning after with two cups of coffee and a newspaper tucked under her arm. She handed Sam the coffee first—already sweetened with cream and sugar, just like he took it—and then the paper, opened neatly to a column in the middle of the editorials, well towards the back of the issue.

Sam blinked at the title, looked up, then read it again.

 _“Morningstar Is Behind the Bombings, and I Can Prove It,”_ Charlie echoed at him, smiling dryly.

Sam arched his brows. Right now, the leading theory concerning their work was some that it was all some kind of extreme business maneuver. Eliminating competitors, raising demand by decreasing supply—something like that. Good for gossip, entertaining in the way that it was about far off the mark as the papers could get.

This was certainly a new take.

Sam read on—then, abruptly, stopped and backtracked to what he’d just read.

_WRITTEN AND SUBMITTED BY G. NOVAK_

He choked on his coffee.

_“Who stands to gain from destroying Eden’s industry? Surely the very same cult that found destroying one of Elysia’s technological marvels to be an enticing idea must be at fault. Have we all forgotten their complete disregard for the empire’s law-abiding citizens?_

_Indeed, I believe so firmly that Morningstar is the guilty party behind the bombings that the only reason this article was published in the editorial section was my editor’s bullheaded insistence that ‘speculation’ is not a valid basis on which to be printed on the front page._

_Never mind that—"_

Sam set down the paper, deciding not to finish if only in order to preserve his own sanity. The sheer _stupidity_ , and from someone that’d seemed so _clever…_ a fucking shame.

“He’s right, but I don’t want to give him credit for it because he’s a prick,” Sam remarked.

“Yeah, but he’s smart,” Charlie laughed. “You met him—imagine if he was on our side.”

Sam didn’t, because some part of him still wanted to be disappointed that he wasn’t.

Not _that_ disappointed—he had better things to do than wonder how clever people might have turned out if they hadn’t been raised like dogs, but—well, it was just another might-have-been, and Sam’s life had been made up of too many of those as it was.

And personal feelings aside, professionally speaking only, Sam’s job got a lot harder after that.

Because later that week saw Sam ducking into the yawning maw of the closest alley, pulling Charlie in after him. They’d managed not to be spotted as they’d passed by, but getting in would be a nightmare, let alone getting out once the half dozen guards he’d counted knew that they were there—

“Well, now I guess we know how many bombings it takes for these places to start hiring night guards,” she dryly remarked, brows arched. “Least it’s not the real police.”

“How fast do you think you can get in there, set things up, and get out?” Sam asked, the beginnings of a plan already starting to take shape in his mind.

“Less than two minutes,” Charlie replied after a moment of thought. Her brow furrowed. “Wait—”

Sam tugged his coat open, passed the explosive over into Charlie’s puzzled hands, pulled out his revolver next, checked the cylinder—seven separate chambers, each loaded. Only as insurance, of course—the guards were civilians, just as unlucky as the workers slaving away during the day. Hell, for all he knew, they were one and the same.

“Okay—here’s what we’ll do.” Sam tucked his revolver into his front pocket—easier access—and threw in a moon clip to keep it company. “I’ll draw them out as a decoy while you set things up.”

“What, you’re gonna take out _six_ of them at once?”

“Not at once,” Sam lightly scoffed, even though he’d half been planning to do just that.

And he sort of did that anyways—the first went down easy when he had the element of surprise on his side, but the third had gotten out a warning cry first, sent the rest of them swarming—and Sam earned himself a set of neatly bruised knuckles and an equally purple eye to with it.

“I think it looks kind of sexy,” Charlie told him later as they were walking to Lucifer’s. Conspiringly, she added, “Bet the guys at _the_ _bar_ would think so too.”

Sam thought about it for a moment, considered the number of papers and plans and letters piled on his desk at home, then offered a conciliatory shrug as his workaholism won out.

“Rain check?” he asked,

“Fine,” Charlie groaned, “But _next_ time, we’re going. You need to take a break.”

His mouth curled into a dry smile, flexing his stiff knuckles at his sides.

“I’ll take one when I’m dead.”

Charlie snorted at his side and Sam’s grin grew just a little wider, but even as he said it, he was already half-convinced it was truth.

 

* * *

 

A few weeks later, another few increasingly difficult sabotages later, Lucifer summoned him. Sam was there in half an hour, naturally, albeit little confused. He didn’t have anything else planned for another two days, and he’d already run it by Lucifer, gotten it approved. As far as he’d known, there was nothing that needed to be done.

Lucifer answered after the first knock.

“Have you read this morning’s edition of the _Eden Herald?”_ he questioned in lieu of a greeting, ushering Sam inside.

Sam decided it’d be better not to mention that he hadn’t even known it _was_ morning until Lucifer’s messenger had come knocking at the door, pulled Sam’s attention away from his desk.

“Haven’t had a chance yet.”

Without another word, Lucifer pointed him in the direction of the paper he had splayed out over the counter, motioned for Sam to take a look. He did—hesitantly now—and felt his pulse quicken once he’d read the words emblazoned across the front page.

 _“Alighieri Steamworks_ to Reopen Production in Adjacent Factory Yard,” Sam read aloud, just to make sure he wasn’t imagining them. Sam stared intensely at the paper, half-certain it’d change if he just focused hard enough— _mech cannonfire shattered the morning, screams pierced—_ grit his teeth ‘til his jaw cracked. “What are you showing me this for?” he finally said once he was sure he could his keep his voice even enough to ask.

Lucifer, sensing Sam was about to accidentally tear the whole thing in half with how badly his hands were shaking, took the paper back, placed it neatly back down onto the counter.

“Well, I want you to stop them, obviously.”

And just like that, Sam had plans for the night.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Sam actually forgot _Eden_ had a police force. They didn’t venture into the East End all that often, after all, electing instead to deal with its problems from the comfort of their North Side headquarters—and ineffectually, at that. Sam couldn’t remember a single time he’d ever felt truly threatened by _Eden’s_ municipal police.

That was how he knew that the ambush that’d been laid out for him had not been crafted by _Eden’s_ police and was certainly not being _executed_ by them.

Sam slammed his head back, the rear of his skull connecting with his attacker’s nose in a bloody _crunch._ The man snarled a curse, the arm around Sam’s neck loosened, and he freed himself with a jerk.

Christ, and the night had started well. Charlie at his side, no guards patrolling the yard despite the slew of increased security around the city even though they'd already hit _Alighieri Steamworks_ once already too— _stupid, why didn’t you think that was suspicious?—_ they’d snuck in unseen, maneuvered through the factory, found their designated drop spot.

Started to set the thing up, when— _click._

It _could’ve_ been any number of things. Machinery settling into its place. Rats running along the hard-concrete floor. A figment of his imagination. But Sam hadn’t survived this long being a dumbass, so he knew damn well that someone had just pulled back the hammer on a revolver.

Sam and Charlie came to the exact same conclusion at the exact same time, but by then, they were already being ambushed. Someone had wrapped a beefy arm around Sam’s neck from behind, squeezed hard enough that the world had taken on a grainy aspect along the rims—and _fuck_ , that was when he’d known he was in trouble.

Sam had slammed his head back, at least gotten out of his attacker’s grip, head whipping to the side— _there,_ at the end of the hall, he saw a flash of red hair disappearing down a corridor with a handful of shadows in close pursuit. Good—chances were one of them could get away if they split up.

Sam didn’t waste any time in sprinting the opposite direction, swinging sharply to the side, darting into a narrow passageway made of machinery, wondered who the _hell_ these people were in between wildly swinging his head around, listening for footsteps.

He could _hear_ them all around him, shouting, closing in, felt like a rabbit surrounded by a pack of hounds, so he ran like a dog with a stick looming over him, gun in hand.

Sam burst out of the corridor—someone was waiting for him, tackled him to the ground. They went skidding across the floor in a flurry of limbs, weapons clattering out of reach. Sam took a knee to the stomach, a punch to the jaw, responded with one to the man’s nose, earned himself another _crunch._ The man beneath him howled.

Sam scrambled away. Grabbed for his gun, found the stranger’s instead—not his, not familiar, but a weapon nonetheless. Stumbled onto his feet, tried to blink the dizziness away. Ran.

Ducked into a corridor that led out of the factory floor, sprinted down a carpeted path, burst out into the night and—skidded to a halt.

Two men were waiting for him there this time, and their guns were already drawn.

 _Fuck—_ of course they’d have the exits covered. He spared a brief thought for Charlie, wished he could somehow warn her in case she hadn’t made it outside already, but his thoughts were quickly otherwise occupied by the revolver jerked in his direction.

“Drop it,” the man closest to him ordered, motioning towards the pistol in Sam’s hand, the one he’d taken off his attacker only a few moments before.

Sam weighed his options—not that it really mattered. He was outnumbered.

Reluctantly, he finally relented, let it fall from his grasp, lifted his hands halfway into the air.

He’d find an opening. He just needed a second, one slip-up, just a split second.

Gun or not, he still had his knife tucked in his pocket— _not that it matters, they’d pump you full of lead before you ever got within a foot of them anyways._

At least they seemed to want him alive.

“Good ambush,” Sam wryly remarked, stalling for time as he tried to come up with something, think of some way he could get himself out of this. “It only took you, what, seven weeks to figure out where I'd be?”

_Know thy enemy._

If he could figure something out about them, find some kind of weakness, then he might stand a chance.

Sam slowed down, dragged in a breath, studied the two of them carefully. Both were dressed well—trousers, shirt, waistcoat, coat, tie, watch on a chain—nothing like any kind of police uniform Sam had seen before. Their posture was rigid, service revolvers held steady in their hands—former military? He looked closer, caught a flash of blue ink on the blonde man's wrist, realized what it was. It was the  _Elysian Marksmen Corps_ tattoo, the same fucking one only the best shooters in the military were allowed to get.

Oh, he was in deep shit.

“So you’re the bastard that’s been fucking with _Eden_ , huh?” the man’s blonde-haired partner concluded, giving Sam an ugly once-over. “That bitch you were here with earlier your girlfriend?”

Sam’s fingers twitched, but he didn’t rise to the bait. No, he’d match question-for-question instead, see if they’d give anything away in their reaction.

“Are you with the _Eden_ police?”

Blonde-hair smirked, looked smugly at Sam like he was an idiot— _so no._

“Are there any more of you?” the light haired man asked in kind, mocking.

Sam narrowed his eyes, about respond with a question of his own—a flash of white light cut him off, blinded him. His eyes snapped shut to stave off the glare, leaving him to blink away the spots of color left dancing across his vision.

“What the fuck was that?” one of the men asked, the only thing convincing Sam he hadn’t suddenly hallucinated the whole thing, suffered from one too many hits from the head.

“Fuck—it’s that _bastard,”_ the second snarled, spinning around and aiming his gun wildly at their surroundings but never locking onto anything in particular.

“Which bastard?” Sam warily asked, shifting uneasily on his feet.

Both the men whirled back to him, exchanged a look with each. Neither answered him. Instead the blonde-haired man only took another step towards him, repeated what he’d asked earlier—angrier this time.

“Are there more of you?”

Sam still wasn’t sure what to make of what’d just happened, but the moment had passed. So he narrowed his eyes, recovered, asked what he’d been planning on asking earlier.

“Fancy tattoo—so if you're not police, then are you active military?”

That earned him a more intense flash of anger, another threatening step towards him—and now Sam noticed that the blonde-haired man had a limp, that his left leg dragged like it was bothering him. That explained the anger, then.

“No—you were invalidated home after receiving an injury to the leg, weren’t you?” Sam concluded, answering his own question. His eyes narrowed. “Veteran turned into a paramilitary police force?” he ventured. Smiled wryly, showed his teeth. “That’s kind of typical, isn’t it?”

The blonde-haired man stepped forwards until he was near chest-to-chest with Sam, close enough that Sam could make out the rings of color in his eyes. The man’s lips peeled back to reveal too-white teeth.

“You ask too many questions.”

Sam took a half-step backwards, turned, crumpled to the ground. It was only after a few moments of blinding pain that he realized he’d been hit—pistol-whipped, too fast to even realize until it was too late. A sluggish trickle of blood dripped down his temple as he tried to make sense of the world around him, tried to test out all his higher functions, see if he was really still conscious.

“Hey!” he distantly heard one of them call, “We got one!”

His back was to him, he vaguely registered. His hands were hidden.

“Think Zachariah will be happy? Think the other one might’ve gotten away.”

Well, it was as good of a chance as he was going to get.

“Sure—his man will get him to talk.”

Sam’s fingers snuck into his coat, curled around the handle of his knife.

“Crazy to think they’ve got a woman running around with them, isn’t it?”

A set of footsteps neared him.

“ _Morningstar’s_ full of fucking lunatics—don’t know why you’re surprised. They're all _Avernian_ bastards anyways.”

Sam didn’t believe in a god anymore, but just in case, he sent up a quick prayer.

A hand grabbed his hair, jerked back his head—Sam threw himself around with all his weight, came face-to-face with the blonde-haired man, jammed the blade of his knife up against his throat before he could so much as even flinch. Gritted his teeth, blinked away the blood in his eye.

His partner was still a few steps behind, just as slow to react, only just about to raise his gun again—he’d let it down while Sam had been down. Not clever for ex-military.

“Drop it and kick it away,” Sam ordered him, rising unsteadily to his feet with his hostage clamped tightly against his chest by the arm Sam had looped around his neck. “ _Now_ ,” he snapped, not willing to let himself get stalled, cornered by reinforcements.

He was outside, so close to getting away— _fuck_. All he had to do was make it a hundred feet to get out of the factory yard. He’d lose them in under a minute in all of the East End’s impossible-to-navigate twists, but out in the open?

Sam dug his knife in, drew a threatening line of blood.

And for a moment, he thought the man’s partner would shoot him anyways, consequences be damned—military men were like that. Sam had seen it enough himself to know. But, no, the blonde-haired man's friend finally complied, dropped and kicked his gun past Sam—just in time, just as a voice nearby called out the men’s names.

Sam threw his hostage at the man with as much force as he could manage and broke into a sprint. He’d bought himself a twenty-foot head start—eighty feet to go.

New voices joined the two he’d left behind, cried out after them.

_Crack._

Sam stumbled at the sound of a gunshot, nearly face-planted, only keeping his muscles from betraying him completely through sheer force of will. He didn’t know why he’d almost tripped—it was hardly the first time someone had shot at him, and unlike other times, he’d actually been expecting it.

Sixty feet left.

Why had he almost tripped? The question nagged at him.

Thirty feet.

It wasn’t like he’d been hit.

Fifteen. Ten. Five.

Fuck—he'd made it.

Sam turned into the closest alley, scrambled over the fence at the end, took a left, a right, ran until he was sure the voices behind him were gone. They’d never stood a chance in catching him, not when Sam had the home field advantage, but he gasped in a sigh of relief anyways—then another, finding it strangely hard to catch his breath.

He supposed he had just run a few miles at top speed, but he was conditioned for this kind of thing. Had to be the heat—it was strangely hot for this time of night. Sweat stuck to his brow like glue, dripped into his eyes, no matter how much he tried to wipe it away with his sleeve.

Sam walked a mile before he realized he had, in fact, been hit.

He walked another three before he made it to Lucifer’s.

Didn’t bother knocking. Opened the door, nearly collapsed against the door frame.

“I prefer that you knock, you know,” Lucifer remarked, looking up from his book once—then again, this time sharper, raw concern surfacing on his face for maybe the first time in their long association.

Sam wondered just how bad that meant he looked.

“I think I got shot,” he dumbly said, tongue not able to form any other words.

Lucifer was at his side in an instant, looping Sam’s arm around his shoulder, practically carrying him over to the armchair in front of the fireplace—Lucifer’s favorite.

“I’m going to bleed all over your chair,” Sam protested, vaguely pulling away.

“You are— _Sam,”_ Lucifer irritably replied, half-pushing him down into his chair anyways.

He disappeared for a moment and Sam took the quiet as an invitation to close his eyes, start to drift off—and then Lucifer was back, gently shaking his shoulder until he blinked awake.

“Usually, I'd get the doctor, but since you're clearly already short more blood than you can spare, I’m going to sew this closed myself,” Lucifer calmly explained, opening a first-aid kit—that must’ve been what he’d gone to get _._ “While I do, tell me exactly what happened.”

Sam watched dully as Lucifer steadily threaded a needle—he got it on his first try, impressively enough—and then gently peeled back Sam’s blood-sticky sleeve to expose the wound.

“So?” Lucifer prodded him as he started to clean the wound, slow the bleeding.

“Went to the new _Alighieri Steamworks_ like you asked. Got inside fine—no _…_ ” Sam flinched as Lucifer wiped his arm down with peroxide, even though the sting was distant, dampened by shock. “No guard. Got in fine, started to set up the explosives, got…”

Sam made the mistake of looking down, felt nauseous as he saw far deeper into his arm than he’d ever wanted to. He groaned sickly, tipped his head back, tried to cling to consciousness.

“Keep talking,” Lucifer advised him.

“Got ambushed—don’t know where Charlie is. Sounded like she might’ve gotten out, but— _fuck!”_

Lucifer’s free hand pinned Sam’s bleeding arm to the armrest as he thrashed, keeping his limb still as he started to stitch up the gouge. He hardly felt the needle itself, but the feeling of something there, something sticking so deep into his arm--Sam gritted his teeth, willed himself to stop fighting.

It was surprisingly easy, to let the pain fade to nothing more than white noise. He was only hanging to awareness by a thread as it was, blood loss making his head light.

“Tell me about who ambushed you,” Lucifer ordered, composure unbroken.

Sam’s tongue was heavy, mind hazy, but he answered anyways.

“Ex-military. The ones I fought, anyways. Weren’t dressed out but had the guns. One had a... limp. Some kind of injury—must've been invalidated home. Think someone— _fuck—_ think someone’s recruiting them once they come back. Creating a… some kind of secret police. Irregulars.”

Even through his haze, Sam didn’t miss how Lucifer’s eyes narrowed.

“Halfway done. You’re doing well,” he silkily praised Sam, voice not betraying the tension his face had taken on. “What else can you tell me?”

“One of them mentioned… a Zachariah—their boss, I think.”

Lucifer paused—and that was how Sam knew he’d said something important. He forced himself to sit a little more upright, tried to focus on Lucifer’s face, read whatever was going on his head.

“Do you know him?”

Lucifer took his time in answering—another deviance from his usual behavior.

“Yes,” he finally admitted, succinct. “He’s the Prime Minister’s right-hand.”

He stood—he’d finished, done the last few stitches without Sam even realizing—and with cool fingers, he lifted Sam’s jaw. Face unreadable, he gently wiped away the blood from the cuts marring his face with the same careful concentration he applied to everything else, maybe the only thing in Sam’s life that hadn’t changed over the past eight years.

Sam watched him through half-lidded eyes, not for the first time wondering just what was going through his head. Lucifer was—he was a black hole with a white star at the center, pulling everything around him in with a magnetic force. Everything in his aura seemed washed-out, grey next to him, unimpressive as a candle in front of the sun.

_Lucifer likes you, you know._

Sam wanted to—well, it was complicated. And it was probably for the best that Sam fell into the dark before he could try to put any of it into words.

* * *

 

The adrenaline of shock had worn off by the time Sam woke up, which more or less had the effect of making him wish he hadn’t at all. His whole body felt hot, lightheaded, a little like he’d come down with a case of the flu—and his _arm._

Well—at least he could be sure of _where_ he’d been shot. Reluctantly, Sam peeled back the veritable blanket of bandages wrapped around his arm to get a good look at the wound.

It actually wasn’t as bad as the bleeding last night had led him to believe—sure, there was a veritable half inch of so of skin and muscle skimmed off his forearm, but it’d been well-stitched up already, would probably close up completely in a few weeks. It’d leave a nasty scar, certainly, a neat little indent where flesh had once been—but all things considered, he’d gotten off easy.

No shattered bullet, no bone fragments—clean entry, clean exit.

Experimentally, Sam flexed his forearm, felt the muscle around the stitches grow tight. Pain was quick to follow so he relaxed just as quickly, but knowing his arm still worked fine filled him with relief that cut through the lingering haze around his mind. If he could getting an infection, Lucifer might let him come back to work by the end of the month.

His most pressing concern dealt with, Sam glanced around, reoriented himself with the world.

Lucifer’s living room surrounded him, empty of anyone else. His eyes settled on the window, taking note of the sky outside. It was still tinged faintly with pink, so it couldn’t have been much past sunrise. He’d only been out a couple hours, then.

Almost instantly after that, Sam’s mind flickered to Charlie, whether or not she’d made it out fine. But just as worry started to set in, his eyes locked onto the checkered coat hung on the rack by the door—far too small to be his, far too unfashionable for Lucifer to ever deign to put it on.

“Lucifer?” he called out, carefully rising to his feet. He had to know, one way or another. “I’m up!”

As if summoned, Lucifer was in the opening to the corridor in a second.

“Your friend is sleeping in the guest room,” he said, already able to guess the question on Sam’s tongue. “She came in half an hour after you—a split lip, but otherwise no worse for the wear.”

Sam sunk back into the armchair—now finally taking note of the blackening bloodstains staining the fabric—and grimaced, but Lucifer silenced him with a look before he could get out an apology.

“Well, do _I_ look worse for the wear?” Sam dryly asked.

Lucifer pretended not to have heard the question, which was really enough of an answer in itself. Instead, he crossed the room, picked up a paper he’d set down on his desk, handed it to Sam.

“Read it,” his boss ordered him, voice revealing nothing.

Sam glanced down, eyes flicking to the bold-printed title. It was the same paper Lucifer had shown him yesterday morning, even dated from the day before. Still, he complied.

“ _Alighieri Steamworks_ to Reopen in Adjacent Factory Yard,” Sam read out.

Lucifer just signaled for him to go on when he glanced up in confusion, so he did.

And, abruptly, his fingers crunched around the paper's edges as he read the line just below that.

The pieces to a puzzle Sam hadn't even realized he was in suddenly snapped into place.

So that was it, then—the perfect ambush, perfectly planned, perfectly executed, perfectly laid out by perhaps the only person in the empire who’d lived up to what he’d promised.

_Morningstar Is Behind the Bombings, and I Can Prove It._

 

Indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am literally never making a promise about when i will update again because i am the world's biggest fucking liar
> 
> but at least i no longer have to stress about finals (like i was for most of my impromptu hiatus) so that's a good thing that may or may not lead to more creative productivity. no promisees though becuase i am a fucking liar
> 
> anyways! comments and kudos make the brain machine work faster


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